IBM Starts Winding Down Power10 System Sales

February 9, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It may be hard to believe it, but the big, bad Power E1080, which is based on the Power10 processor, has been selling since September 2021. The remainder of the Power10 line, including entry and midrange machines, was announced in July 2022. And now, with the Power11 machines announced last July shipping in volume from top to bottom excepting the Power S1112 Mini, which should be coming out soon, and IBM doing build to order for all of its Power11 machines, it only stands to reason that Big Blue would stop selling Power10 iron as soon as it can.

It is time to move to a new generation.

Don’t panic, though. IBM will support Power10 machine long after it stops selling systems based on Power10 processors. Moreover, many Power10 peripherals will be sold for years to come until supplies run out, and there will also be a pretty healthy supply of Power10 stuff available through second-hand system resellers.

Big Blue doesn’t just stop cold when it wants to stop selling something. The company gives customers plenty of warning – usually around six months, but sometimes more. In this case, China and South Korea are going to be able to get Power10 iron for a year longer than the rest of the world, which is peculiar. (More on this in a second.)

In announcement letter AD26-0012, dated January 13, IBM said that the following machines would not be sold after July 31, 2026 everywhere on Earth except in China and South Korea, which will be able to buy these machines from Big Blue until July 30, 2027. Ranked from big to small, they are:

Power E1080: 9080-HEX
Power E1050: 9043-MRX
Power S1024: 9105-42A
Power L1024: 9786-42H
Power S1022: 9105-22A
Power L1022: 9786-22H
Power S1022s: 9105-22B
Power S1014: 9105-41B

You will note that the “Bonnell” Power S1012 Mini system, the halfwidth Power10 machine announced in May 2024, was not on the withdrawal list. That’s because its successor, the Power S1112 Mini, has not been announced as yet.

The withdrawal does not apply to machine upgrades – what IBM calls Miscellaneous Equipment Specification, or MES – for the Power E1080. Upgrades to this machine from prior systems will still be available, which helps to preserve serial numbers for longer depreciation. This is important for the balance sheets at the companies that use big Power iron. The other parts of the Power10 product line do not, as far as we know, have MES upgrades from prior models available. IBM stopped doing serial number-preserving upgrades of entry and midrange machines a long time ago in the Power Systems line.

In addition to the machines being withdrawn from marketing, IBM says that static and mobile processor activations on these machines for use in the course of a transition from one machine to another (which is not the same thing as an upgrade in the sense that Big Blue uses that word) will no longer be sold after those July dates in 2026 and 2027, respectively. Various levels of Advanced Expert Care and Power Expert Care services from IBM will also not be sold for these Power10 machines after those cutoff dates. Some networking cables and power cords are also being removed from the sales catalog at those times, too, and on the smaller machines, a bunch of processor feature cards, adapter cards, DDR5 memory cards, flash storage devices, and other peripherals are also getting the axe. This withdrawal is for new systems orders only – and apparently that means that it does not apply to individual peripheral orders to be added to existing Power10 machines.

I don’t know about you, but with this modern brittle supply chain, I don’t trust that one tiny bit. So my advice is that if you have a Power10 machine, and you think you might want to add some stuff to it, you basically have until the end of July this year to git ‘er done unless you are in China, in which case you have until July next year to bǎ tā zuòwán and in South Korea you have the same time to haenaeda. If some peripheral is available directly from IBM after that, consider it a bonus.

As usual, these withdrawals to not apply to Power10 processor activations or memory activations. IBM always lets you activate any latent capacity you have left over inside you machine with these CPU and memory capacity. It is happy to take the money.

Which brings us back to China and South Korea. The Power9 processor and its Power10 follow-on has been very popular in these two countries (and others in the Asia/Pacific region) for running applications in the banking, financial services, and insurance agencies. Perhaps these customers have expressed a desire to have access to Power10 iron longer, or they have excess inventories in these countries. Perhaps IBM is worried about the possibility of triggering export controls on Power11 into China, but that doesn’t explain South Korea. It could just be that with tariffs going up and down all the time, that IBM or its resellers already has an inventory of Power10 machines in China and South Korea already and they want to burn it off before they start pushing Power11 hard.

All we know for sure is that IBM really wants to sell Power11 iron, and that means there will be a lot of Power8 and Power9 iron coming into the secondhand market. We do not expect a lot of customers to move from Power10 to Power11, unless they got Power10 very early in the cycle. There are some important differences between Power10 and Power11, to be sure, but not enough to warrant a big and pesky upgrade or system transition. Not with IBM i 7.5 being perfectly current thanks to the Technology Refresh mechanism. Power10 customers will be looking for Power12 iron some years hence – maybe around three or so.

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