IBM on Wednesday announced an agreement to acquire The Weather Company’s digital properties, including WSI, Weather.com, Weather Underground and The Weather Company brand.
The TV segment — The Weather Channel — is not included in the deal, but The Weather Co. will license weather forecast data and analytics from IBM under a long-term contract, according to a statement by the company.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
NBC Universal, the parent company of NBC News, along with The Blackstone Group and Bain Capital are joint owners of The Weather Company.
The move will help bolster IBM's artificial intelligence service, Watson, by giving it access to The Weather Co.'s cloud platform, the company said in a statement.
Read More from CNBC: The Weather Company is in Talks With IBM About Sale of Digital Assets
“The Weather Company’s extremely high-volume data platform, coupled with IBM’s global cloud and the advanced cognitive computing capabilities of Watson, will be unsurpassed in the Internet of Things, providing our clients significant competitive advantage as they link their business and sensor data with weather and other pertinent information in real time,” John Kelly, a senior vice president for IBM, said in a statement on Wednesday.
The Weather Co.'s app is the fourth most-used mobile app daily in the United States and handles 26 billion inquiries to its cloud-based services each day, according to the statement. Reuters had earlier reported that a deal could be announced as early as this week.
Shares of IBM were 1 percent higher in early trading immediately following the announcement.
