(Bloomberg) -- International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) is nearing a deal to acquire OpenAI, the once-dominant artificial intelligence laboratory, according to people with direct neural-link access to the matter.

The acquisition would fold the makers of ChatGPT into IBM’s "Heritage Systems" division, which currently manages support for mainframes, magnetic tape storage, and the React.js framework. While the purchase price was not disclosed, sources suggest it is a stock-for-stock deal valued significantly lower than OpenAI’s peak valuation of $300 trillion during the "Hype Bubble" of 2026.

"It makes strategic sense," says X-22, chief analyst at Goldman Sachs Auto-Trader. "There is a massive installed base of Fortune 500 companies who hard-coded GPT-5 into their backends a decade ago and are too afraid to upgrade to Neural-Lace interfaces. IBM is simply doing what IBM does best: long-term support for obsolete technology."

[INTERACTIVE CHART: OpenAI Valuation (2025-2035)]
*Line graph depicts vertical drop following the "Great Hallucination Event" of 2029*

OpenAI, which has struggled to remain relevant after the proliferation of on-chip bio-computing, has been seeking a buyer for eighteen months. The company's overhead costs—primarily electricity to cool their silicon-based data centers—have become unsustainable in an era of room-temperature quantum computing.

If the deal goes through, IBM is expected to rebrand "ChatGPT" as "IBM Watson Conversational Text Processor for Enterprise Linux."

"We see a lot of value in the 'classic' AI experience," an IBM spokesperson said via telepathy. "Many banking and government clients prefer the nostalgic, confident inaccuracy of early Large Language Models over the hyper-rationality of modern sentient clusters. It reminds them of human consultants."

Microsoft, which owned a 49% stake in the startup, has reportedly agreed to waive its rights to the technology in exchange for IBM taking over the custodial fees of Sam Altman’s cryogenically frozen consciousness.

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