IBM CEO Ginni Rometty says the pledge includes an expansion of the company’s U.S. cloud data center. | Getty Ahead of Trump-tech meeting, IBM announces hiring, investment pledge

IBM CEO Ginni Rometty announced Tuesday that her company would hire 25,000 new workers over the next four years, a pledge that comes a day before she and her tech colleagues are set to meet with President-elect Donald Trump in New York to talk about the economy.

Writing in USA Today, Rometty said her hiring commitment — which includes 6,000 fresh hires in the next year — would be coupled with $1 billion for training and development for IBM workers and an expansion of the company’s U.S. cloud data center.

Rometty's commitments set the stage for her arrival Wednesday — along with executives from Alphabet, Apple, Facebook and others — at Trump Tower for a meeting with the president-elect and his team, which will focus on jobs and the economy. Asked about the timing, an IBM spokesman said the targets are new and the company is "announcing them now as a basis for engaging the incoming administration on how the right policies can create more New Collar opportunities for U.S. workers."

The open letter is not Rometty’s first outreach to the Trump administration. Days after he won, she penned a letter promising to work with Trump to “achieve the aspiration you articulated and that can advance a national agenda in a time of profound change.”

Rometty pointed to so-called new collar jobs and to IBM’s previous efforts to “identify $1 trillion in savings the federal government could achieve” through the use of technology, much of which her company currently sells.