They could be using that to do what AWS does with Graviton2 - cost control their completely integrated stack and make it a competitive advantage. Sell more performance per dollar despite having a non-amd64 architecture. Use it to give everyone more choice and competition. But instead they mostly use it to lock in their old (or new?) enterprise customers. The irony is that these two models could easily coexist, but they don't seem to understand the former and understand the latter very well.
And I can't help but think the latter is a losing model, as my strong impression is that the movement in the enterprise is away from "enterprise hardware", and towards commodity hardware. IBM needs to work on becoming commodity, in my opinion.
I know some of the IBM story from very close and it takes a certain attitude to even want to work there.
If IBM had even just kept pace and stayed behind AWS with Softlayer after they acquired them, they would have a healthy cloud business by now. It might be because I maintained a system on Softlayer both pre and post acquisition - so I was really close and able to see what was happening - but they squandered a huge opportunity there.
That's why you'll never see a Netflix or a Whatsapp on IBM infra. But banks, insurance companies, medical companies etc are still large contributors to IBMs revenue streams. If your idea of software development is agile teams and capable programmers churning out code to power your business then you're not an IBM customer or even a prospect.
If your idea of software is 5000 programmers as interchangeable cogs in a machine with an annual release and three month acceptance cycles then IBM is where you'll probably end up.