IBM also wants to play its cards in the thriving Artificial Intelligence market. And it does so by completing one of the most important purchase operations in its more than one hundred year history. The Armonk company has in fact announced the purchase of Confluent, a company specialized in real-time data streaming, for 11 billion dollars including debt. An operation that confirms how the group led by Arvind Krishna has adopted a repositioning strategy on software and artificial intelligence.
In more detail, the agreement provides for a price of 31 dollars per share, for an equity value of approximately 9.3 billion. The closing is expected by mid-2026. After the news, Confluent – which until yesterday had a market cap close to $6 billion – rose by around 27 percent in the New York premarket, while IBM lost almost two percentage points.
But what does Confluent do, and why is this purchase strategic? It’s a California company based in Mountain View (just a stone’s throw from Google) that develops a platform that allows businesses to collect and analyze streams of data in real time, an increasingly central element for artificial intelligence systems that require continuous updates to function. For example, companies like Michelin use Confluent to track raw material inventories dynamically. Or Instacart, which has adopted technology for fraud detection systems and to improve the visibility of the products available on its platform.
For IBM, which has invested heavily in AI software and services in recent years, the operation represents a further step towards building a complete offering for businesses. Also considering the fact that today the software is worth almost half of the group’s total revenues and continues to grow. The Confluent acquisition would be the largest since 2019, when IBM bought Red Hat for $34 billion. But in that case there was no AI involved.
The move comes in a context in which artificial intelligence is fueling a wave of billion-dollar acquisitions along the entire technological supply chain: from data centers to data management to cloud services. Unlike recent large deals focused on physical infrastructure, Confluent is positioned in the data segment, the element that allows AI models to operate in real time.