IBM to acquire Confluent for $11 billion to bolster AI services

IBM and Confluent have announced they have entered into a definitive agreement under which IBM will acquire all of the issued and outstanding common shares of Confluent for USD 31 per share, representing an enterprise value of USD 11 billion. 

Confluent, a California-based company, provides a leading open-source enterprise data streaming platform that connects, processes and governs reusable and reliable data and events in real time. 

IBM and Confluent will enable end-to-end integration of applications, analytics, data systems and AI agents to drive intelligence and resilience in hybrid cloud environments, according to a press release.

“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. Data is spread across public and private clouds, datacenters and countless technology providers,” 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.”

“Since its founding, Confluent has helped organizations unlock the full potential of their data, driving innovation in an increasingly complex IT landscape. 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,” said Jay Kreps, CEO & Co-founder, Confluent. “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.”

In the last four years alone, Confluent’s total addressable market (TAM) has doubled from USD 50 billion to USD 100 billion in 2025, the press release said.