IBM Granite
IBM's own family of open language models, published under the Apache 2.0 licence so they can be downloaded, tuned, and run on hardware you own.
Granite is IBM's open model family. Granite 4.0, released in October 2025, introduced a hybrid design mixing Mamba-2 layers with conventional transformer attention in roughly a nine to one ratio, which IBM reports cuts memory use by more than 70 percent and roughly doubles inference speed for long-context and multi-session work. Granite 4.2 followed on August 25, 2026 in 3B, 8B, and 30B sizes, adding reasoning that can be switched on or off and stronger tool calling. Granite 4.0 models were the first open models to receive ISO 42001 certification and are cryptographically signed. Red Hat bundles Granite into Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI, and IBM Research has run a 3 billion parameter Granite model on its NorthPole research chip.
Related Terms
InstructLab
An open source project from IBM Research and Red Hat that lets a subject matter expert add knowledge to a model without being a data scientist.
Red Hat AI Inference Server
Red Hat's model serving product, built on the open source vLLM engine. IBM lists it as one of two supported ways to drive a Spyre Accelerator on IBM Power.
NorthPole
An IBM Research chip with no off-chip memory at all, claiming 25 times the energy efficiency of a conventional architecture. Research only, not for sale.