I really have no idea how IBM is still in business, or the other big toxic techs like Oracle and Salesforce. Just goes to show I don’t know as much about the industry as I think.

They bought Red Hat, which has OpenShift and all their other "DIY Cloud" bits. This stuff is popular in government or old businesses that may have been slow to (or unable to for regulatory reasons) jump to AWS/GCP etc.

To say nothing of the banks and others still using the IBM big iron.

The American hyper scalers are not necessarily the place to be. Modern can mean Non-hyper scalar as well. Can this sentiment just die please? Great that its working out for you and you replaced good sysadmins with aws admins, but it should not be the default strategy perse.

they’ve been partnering with nvidia to build large ML training clusters iirc last time i was in their building at a meetup a few weeks ago

And their financial/stock performance has been pretty good the past couple of years.

When Shakespeare wrote "cowards die many times before their deaths", he had Intel in mind.