IBM agrees $11bn Confluent deal

February 2026 | DEALFRONT | MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS

Financier Worldwide Magazine

February 2026 Issue

In a move that strengthens its artificial intelligence (AI) strategy, IBM has agreed to acquire data infrastructure company Confluent in a transaction valued at $11bn. The agreement covers all issued and outstanding common shares at $31 per share and is aimed at expanding IBM’s cloud and AI capabilities. The offer represents an enterprise value of $11bn and a premium of about 34 percent to Confluent’s last closing price.

The boards of IBM and Confluent, together with Confluent’s independent special committee, have approved the deal, which remains subject to shareholder and regulatory approvals. The companies expect closing by the middle of 2026. IBM has confirmed that the Hart-Scott-Rodino waiting period is scheduled to expire in January, and a shareholder vote is anticipated in the coming months.

IBM plans to fund the purchase with cash on hand. The company expects the transaction to be accretive to adjusted EBITDA in the first full year after completion and to add to free cash flow in the second year.

Confluent’s largest shareholders and investors, holding about 62 percent of voting power, have entered into a voting agreement with IBM committing to vote in favour of the acquisition and against alternatives.

“IBM and Confluent together will enable enterprises to deploy generative and agentic AI better and faster by providing trusted communication and data flow between environments, applications and APIs,” said Arvind Krishna, chairman, president and chief executive of IBM. “Data is spread across public and private clouds, datacenters and countless technology providers. With the acquisition of Confluent, IBM will provide the smart data platform for enterprise IT, purpose-built for AI.”

“Since its founding, Confluent has helped organizations unlock the full potential of their data, driving innovation in an increasingly complex IT landscape,” said Jay Kreps, chief executive and co-founder of Confluent. “We are extremely proud of the work we’ve done in providing clients with a real-time data streaming platform for the next era of technology, including generative and agentic AI. We are excited by the potential to join IBM and to accelerate our strategy with IBM’s go-to-market expertise, global scale and extensive portfolio. I look forward to the future we will build together as Confluent becomes part of IBM.”

Confluent is headquartered in Mountain View, California and has more than 6500 clients, including over 40 percent of the Fortune 500. The company’s platform integrates with leaders such as Anthropic, AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft and Snowflake.

The transaction aligns with IBM’s focus on industry partnerships and an open technology ecosystem spanning application providers, independent software vendors and hyperscalers. Confluent prepares data for AI, keeping it clean and connected across systems and applications and tackles silos in agentic AI. In the past four years Confluent’s total addressable market has doubled from $50bn to $100bn, and expects to surpass $1bn in annual revenue in fiscal 2025.

Founded in 2014 and listed on Nasdaq since 2021, Confluent specialises in real-time data and event streaming. IBM plans to combine these capabilities with its AI infrastructure software and automation offerings to build an end-to-end smart data platform.

IBM has remained active in M&A, using deals in cloud and software to build scale and compete. The company announced its intent to acquire HashiCorp in April 2024 and completed the deal on 27 February 2025 for $6.4bn. IBM acquired Red Hat in 2019 for $34bn, a transaction widely credited with catalysing its hybrid cloud business. In addition, IBM closed its purchase of DataStax in May 2025, further reinforcing its commitment to data-driven innovation and hybrid cloud growth.

The deal underscores IBM’s AI drive.

Richard Summerfield