IBM has announced that it will be acquiring the data streaming company Confluent for $11 billion.
Confluent is built on Apache Kafka, an open source data and event streaming platform that is used in analytics, monitoring, and event-driven architectures. The company has over 6,500 clients, including over 40% of the Fortune 500.
IBM’s rationale behind the acquisition is that it believes that having real-time data capabilities has become critical in an era where data lives across a variety of IT environments. IBM also says that global data is expected to double by 2028 and over one billion new applications will be created, placing even more pressure on IT departments.
Confluent’s capabilities will complement IBM’s Data and Automation portfolio; drive synergies across AI products and services, as well as consulting; and expand IBM’s go-to-market reach, IBM explained.
“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 chief executive officer of IBM. “With the acquisition of Confluent, IBM will provide the smart data platform for enterprise IT, purpose-built for AI.”
“IBM sees the same future we do: one in which enterprises run on continuous, event-driven intelligence, with data moving freely and reliably across every part of the business,” Jay Kreps, CEO and co-founder of Confluent wrote in an email to Confluent employees today. “They see that this connective layer will define how companies operate for decades to come, they understand open source and its power, and they work with some of the largest hybrid enterprises in the world. By joining forces, we can bring this architecture to far more organizations, accelerating the shift toward real-time and AI-powered operations globally.
The acquisition is expected to close in mid-2026, and has already been approved by IBM’s board of directors and Confluent’s independent special committee, though it still needs to be approved by Confluent shareholders and regulators, and is also subject to other standard closing conditions.