IBM drops $11B on Confluent to feed next-gen AI ambitions

IBM has cracked open its wallet again, agreeing to shell out $11 billion for Confluent in a bid to glue together the data sprawl underpinning the next wave of enterprise AI. 

The deal, announced Monday and just weeks after IBM laid off thousands, hands IBM a heavyweight in real-time data streaming as Big Blue bets that future generative and agentic AI systems will live or die on how well they can move and govern data across clouds, data centers, and legacy estates.

IBM will pay $31 a share in cash for Confluent, whose Kafka-based platform has become a staple for organizations trying to pipe clean, consistent, and reusable data into applications and analytics engines. 

Arvind Krishna, IBM CEO, pitched the purchase as the cornerstone of a "smart data platform for enterprise IT, purpose-built for AI," enabling "trusted communication and data flow between environments, applications, and APIs."

Confluent has spent the ...