I've done business with IBM at a corporate level and I assure you that's not what's happening here. It's the clients whom are buying services from IBM saying "whoa, I'm using your services, but I don't want our data falling into the US govt's hands", that they are addressing. IBM is appeasing these clients by telling them they'll locate their data elsewhere, yet there's quite a bit of data attached to and flowing into those services.
In that case, I agree it's pretty pointless. IBM can still be subpoenaed (secretly, even) by the US government, and the NSA has been happy to work with partner agencies overseas to tap datacenter traffic in foreign jurisdictions.
