750 million fans and 2.7 million data points: How IBM’s AI powers Wimbledon from hidden ‘Court 19’

The tennis tournament has become a proving ground for IBM’s tech and is helping business executives overcome their AI fears.

When Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard’s serve was clocked at 153 mph last summer—the fastest in Wimbledon history—the number flashed on the scoreboard before the ball had stopped bouncing. That instant readout traces back to 1991, when IBM first brought serve-speed radar to the Championships, planting radar guns behind the baselines. 

Thirty-six years later, IBM remains Wimbledon’s technology partner, having built the tournament’s website in 1995, its app in 2009, and first introduced AI features in 2017. This year, the partnership was extended until 2030 to carry out a new digital transformation plan, designed, in the words of Wimbledon’s marketing and commercial director Usama Al-Qassab, to “engage more people in more places, more often, in more meaningful ways.” 

More than half a million visitors attend Wimbledon over the Grand Slam fortnight. Yet they’re a fraction of the audience following along on its app. Wimbledon generated roughly 18 billion impressions across its digital channels, reaching an estimated 730 million people in 2025, according to the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club.  

IBM

In the past year, visits to the official Wimbledon website and app increased by over 20% and registrations to myWimbledon grew by 39%. The app operates year-round for ticketing, player services, and member bookings, before traffic surges during the Championships.  

IBM’s hidden technology hub, nicknamed “Court 19”, lies beneath Wimbledon’s 18th grass court. Over the course of the tournament, 2.7 million data points—including ball speed, shot placement, and momentum swings—are processed through the tech facility.  

For a company like IBM, a partnership with Wimbledon isn’t just about tennis, it’s a proving ground. Kameryn Stanhouse, IBM’s vice president of global sports and entertainment partnerships, tells Fortune there’s a “real fear around AI” among executives. “Not because leaders doubt they need to adopt it, but because they know their jobs may be on the line if they roll it out badly,” she says.  

Stanhouse believes that a visible, high-stakes showcase, such as Wimbledon, gives IBM a way to demonstrate it can deploy tech responsibly and reliably.  

Ensuring accuracy 

But executive fears about AI rollouts are not unfounded, both fan sentiment and recent missteps suggest the risk is real. 

A 2025 study by Capgemini found that 70% of sports fans want real-time match data, but more than half worry that too much technology erodes the authenticity of watching sport live.  

Not every rollout has landed smoothly. In 2025, Wimbledon’s 300 line judges, who had been a fixture of the tournament for 147 years, were replaced with an automated electronic line-calling system. The debut was rocky: the system missed three calls during a quarter-final match and, in a separate incident, it called “fault” mid-rally, forcing an umpire to intervene. 

Tennis players have voiced their doubts. The current fifth-ranked British player Jack Draper has questioned the system’s precision, while Emma Raducanu said she didn’t fully trust it, calling some rulings “dodgy”. 

That system isn’t IBM’s—it runs on Sony’s Hawk-Eye—but the episode hangs over every conversation about handing match-changing decisions to a machine. IBM stresses its own features are “human-led”, with a governance layer that scores confidence and checks for bias before anything reaches a fan in real time. It’s a distinction Stanhouse is keen to draw, but for a fan watching a technological error derail a match, the difference between vendors is unlikely to register. 

For years, players could challenge a line judge’s call. This would be followed by the crowd hushing and the ball’s flight being replayed on the big screen, and it became one of Wimbledon’s rituals. Some say the atmosphere has felt colder without it. Even IBM’s “Likelihood to Win”—a prediction tool that recalculates player odds after every point—removes some of the suspense. 

Stanhouse sees the trade-off as worthwhile, even if it removes some of the old theatre. “Fans argue less about the marginal calls and more about the tennis itself and how players are performing,” she says.  

Sport as a proving ground for new tech 

Wimbledon remains the oldest of the four Grand Slam tournaments, steeped in traditions from strawberries and cream to its all-white dress code. That heritage makes any AI rollout a delicate proposition.  

Al-Qassab argues AI is simply a productivity tool that helps Wimbledon serve different audiences without changing the experience itself. “I’m not convinced that it will alienate people,” he says, noting that most spectators still spend matches watching the action, only checking their phones between points. “It’s balanced really finely here and it’s working very well.” Whether that balance holds as its AI features expand further will be the real test. 

IBM has helped reshape fan experiences at some of the world’s biggest sporting events, from Wimbledon to the U.S. Open Golf Championships and the Masters. It’s a booming business, and an increasingly crowded one. The global sports market is forecast to be worth more than $600bn by 2030, according to consultancy Kearney, and IBM is far from the only technology company using sport to prove its AI works before selling it elsewhere.  

Read more: The new CMO playbook: How marketers are balancing broader remits and tighter budgets

According to Stanhouse, sport offers something few industries can: enormous volumes of data generated under pressure. “If the tool works during a match, under maximum scrutiny, it’s already survived a harder test than most enterprise pilots ever face,” Stanhouse says, adding it “gets executives thinking about how the technology could apply to their own businesses.” 

To rebuild Wimbledon’s app and website, IBM used a development accelerator it calls Bob, which migrated more than 15,000 digital assets (articles, photos, videos, and their metadata) to a new platform. Work that would traditionally take five specialists months, Stanhouse says, was done by a single engineer in a month, with the final transfer taking just 47 minutes. “That is exactly the productivity improvement enterprises are straining to evaluate, and Wimbledon is a rare place they can watch it being tested.” 

For Stanhouse, Wimbledon makes the technology tangible. “A lot of people interact with our technology every day and have no idea about it,” she says. “Through the Championships, we put IBM technology in people’s hands and they’re able to feel it.” 

Hyper-personalization and remote experiences are the future of sports fan engagement, Stanhouse says. IBM has already built a Masters app for Apple Vision Pro, letting golf fans watch the tournament in a fully immersive format, and she expects tennis to follow. “It’s all about boosting access in a way that doesn’t exist with some of these coveted events,” she says. 

Quantum computing could also have interesting applications, though IBM is yet to find a use case within sports.   

Despite the consistent encroachment of technology into the sporting field, greater personalization, and more powerful prediction tools, the unpredictable nature of sports is what keeps fans engaged. “No one will ever really know who is going to win. Somebody could wake up with a crick in their neck and can’t serve the way they used to” Stanhouse says.” No technology will ever be an absolute in sports. But that’s why we love it, right?”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com