Technology giant IBM announced that it will acquire data streaming company Confluent in an $11 billion all-cash deal, marking one of its largest acquisitions in recent years and reinforcing the company’s shift toward AI and data-centric technologies. The move highlights how real-time data processing has become foundational for deploying generative and agentic AI at scale across global enterprises.
“IBM and Confluent together will enable enterprises to deploy generative and agentic AI better and faster,” IBM chief executive Arvind Krishna said in a statement. “With the acquisition of Confluent, IBM will provide the smart data platform for enterprise IT, purpose-built for AI.”
Under the agreement, IBM will pay $31 per share for all of Confluent’s outstanding common stock, valuing the company at $11 billion. The deal will be funded using IBM’s existing cash reserves and is expected to close by mid-2026, subject to Confluent shareholder approval, regulatory clearance and customary closing conditions. Both companies’ boards have approved the transaction.
The acquisition reflects a broader strategic pattern for IBM, which in recent years has made targeted purchases in hybrid cloud, cybersecurity and AI to counter slowing legacy software revenues. Confluent gives IBM a modern data streaming platform built on Apache Kafka, a technology used widely for high-speed data pipelines that underpin banking, e-commerce, industrial automation and AI applications. As generative AI models increasingly rely on continuous data flows rather than static databases, platforms like Confluent have become central to enterprise AI architectures.
IBM said global data volumes are expected to more than double by 2028 and argued that traditional data warehouses and batch-processing systems can no longer support the latency and scale that modern AI workloads require. Integrating Confluent into IBM’s AI stack is expected to help enterprises modernise their data foundations, improve decisioning and accelerate deployment of AI throughout their operations.
Confluent, which counts more than 6,500 customers and supports over 40 percent of the Fortune 500, provides cloud-based data streaming services used by companies such as Anthropic, AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft and Snowflake. Its platform helps organisations move large amounts of data across distributed systems in real time—capabilities increasingly critical for fraud detection, personalised services, automated operations and large-scale AI training and inferencing.
The acquisition comes amid a broader consolidation trend in the AI infrastructure space, as large technology companies race to build or acquire the data, compute and tooling layers required to support generative AI adoption. With this deal, IBM is signalling that control over real-time data pipelines—not just compute or models—will be a key differentiator in the next phase of enterprise AI.
