IBM has agreed to acquire data streaming company Confluent for approximately $11 billion, or $31 per share in cash, as part of efforts to build and deliver a data platform that could enable organizations to process, connect and govern data for applications and artificial intelligence agents.
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In a joint release published Monday, the companies said the boards of directors of IBM and Confluent have approved the transaction.
The deal is expected to close by mid-2026, subject to approval by Confluent shareholders, regulatory clearances and other customary closing conditions.
How Will the IBM-Confluent Deal Advance AI Deployment?
Through the transaction, the companies will facilitate end-to-end integration of analytics, applications, data systems and AI agents to drive intelligence in hybrid cloud environments.
“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, chairman, president and CEO of IBM. “With the acquisition of Confluent, IBM will provide the smart data platform for enterprise IT, purpose-built for AI.”
IBM said it expects the deal to be accretive to adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, or EBITDA, within the first full year and free cash flow in the second year, post-close.
“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,” said Jay Kreps, CEO and co-founder of Confluent.
What Does Confluent Do?
Confluent provides an enterprise data streaming platform that processes, links and governs reusable data and events in real time. The company’s offering is built on Apache Kafka, an open-source data and event streaming platform for data in motion.
The Mountain View, California-based company has over 6,500 clients across major industries and partners with technology leaders, including Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Microsoft, Snowflake and GCP.
Confluent’s platform includes Data Streaming, Stream Governance, Connectors, Stream Processing, Confluent Intelligence, Tableflow and Streaming Agents. The company deploys its platform through Confluent Cloud, WarpStream and Confluent Private Cloud, among others.
