IBM has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Confluent, the pioneer of data streaming built on Apache Kafka, for $31 per share in cash — an enterprise value of $11 billion. The deal unites the industry’s leading real-time data streaming platform with IBM’s hybrid cloud and AI portfolio, creating an end-to-end “smart data platform” purpose-built for the agentic AI era.
By 2028, global data volume will more than double and over one billion new logical application per company will emerge — most of them AI-driven. These applications and AI agents require real-time, governed, reusable data streams that today are trapped in silos.
Confluent solves exactly that: it is the connective tissue that keeps data clean, connected, and flowing in real time across clouds, datacenters, and SaaS apps — the missing “data in motion” layer that makes agentic AI actually work at enterprise scale.
"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, IBM chairman, president and chief executive officer. "With the acquisition of Confluent, IBM will provide the smart data platform for enterprise IT, purpose-built for AI."
Jay Kreps, CEO & Co-founder of Confluent, added: "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."
The deal extends IBM’s 25-year open-source legacy (Red Hat, HashiCorp) and instantly makes Confluent the real-time data backbone for watsonx, Automation, and Consulting — dramatically expanding IBM’s addressable market in the $100B+ data-streaming space.
IBM is a leading provider of global hybrid cloud and AI, and consulting expertise. We help clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries.
Confluent is the data streaming platform that is pioneering a fundamentally new category of data infrastructure that sets data in motion. Confluent's cloud-native offering is the foundational platform for data in motion — designed to be the intelligent connective tissue enabling real-time data, from multiple sources, to constantly stream across the organization.
TechIntelPro empowers B2B technology decision-makers with the latest industry trends, deep insights, leadership perspectives and actionable intelligence to drive both organizational and professional milestones—and thrive on the tech pulse.