Dec. 8 (UPI) — IBM announced Monday its buying out Confluent, a steaming platform, in a multi-billion-dollar deal.
Confluent stock shares spiked nearly 30% and IBM at about 1$ after it was revealed IBM will acquire Confluent for $11 billion.
“With the acquisition of Confluent, IBM will provide the smart data platform for enterprise IT, purpose-built for AI,” according to IBM CEO Arvind Krishna.
The transaction is expected to be final by mid-next year, with IBM paying $31 a share for all issued and outstanding Confluent shares.
IBM officials said it will aid the development of new artificial intelligence products likely to double data growth and flood the market by 2028.
Krishna stated that data is spread across public and private clouds, data centers and “countless technology providers.”
“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,” he said in a statement.
In April, IBM announced plans to invest at least $150 billion over a five-year period in U.S. manufacturing to advance IBM’s mainframe and quantum computer systems.
Confluent works with global conglomerates such as Microsoft, Anthropic, Snowflake, Google and Amazon.
It was called a “strong move” by Wedbush analysts.
“We loudly applaud this deal as Arvind [Krishna] takes IBM further into the AI Revolution with more acquisitions likely ahead,” analysts told CNBC.
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