IBM says it’s buying much of Weather Co.

IBM hopes it has a new use for Watson, its artificial intelligence business.

The company said Wednesday that it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire most of the assets of the Weather Co., including its Weather.com website, a large number of weather data collection points, consumer and business applications, and a staff of more than 900.

IBM would not say how much it was paying for the business, but the Wall Street Journal put the deal at more than $2 billion. The Weather Channel, a cable television outlet, was not part of the deal, but it would license weather forecast data from IBM.