IBM said on Friday that U.S. regulators had approved the $2.3 billion sale of its low-end server business to Lenovo Group, as the company continues its shift to more profitable software and services like cloud computing and data analytics. The approval by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States came despite CIFUS members' concern, that IBM servers used in the Pentagon's networks could be accessed remotely by Chinese spies and compromised.

Lenovo said that it remains on track to close the IBM server deal by the end of the year.