IBM dedicated $500 million to invest in AI start-ups across the enterprise sector, an attempt to recruit and partner with fresh companies in the hotly contested sector.

The IBM Enterprise AI Venture Fund will invest in early-stage to hyper-growth start-ups.

IBM stated companies will have “opportunities to develop meaningful partnerships”, along with “gaining operational expertise on product and engineering, and go-to-market strategies”.

Rob Thomas, SVP of software and CCO at IBM, said the fund is “another channel to harness the enormous potential of the AI revolution”.

IBM cited participation in a Series-D funding round for open-source collaboration platform Hugging Face in August, which involved it providing open models and datasets.

Thomas added the fund is another step in an IBM drive to develop responsible AI.