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AI Deals › M&A

M&ADec 8 · IBM

IBM buys Confluent for $11B to stream live data into AI agents

IBM agreed on December 8, 2025 to acquire Confluent, the Kafka company, for $31 a share in cash — about $11B — pitching real-time data streaming as the layer AI agents need under them. It is IBM's biggest deal since Red Hat.

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Source

Rewritten in our words. The original is the source of record.

Deal sheet

CompanyConfluent

TypeAcquisition

Amount$11B

Valuationundisclosed

SectorData streaming

HQMountain View, US

Acquirer

Confluent website ↗

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Source

Rewritten in our words. The original is the source of record.

Deal sheet

CompanyConfluent

TypeAcquisition

Amount$11B

Valuationundisclosed

SectorData streaming

HQMountain View, US

Acquirer

Confluent website ↗

More in M&A

Schneider Electric to acquire PTC for $22.6B, a 42% premium, in an all-cash industrial software deal enso to buy marketing agencies PPG Digital and LeadCoverage for up to $25M to pair AI agents with human teams Nebius buys 10-month-old Inferize for up to $150M to kill GPU cold starts Salesforce to buy AI customer-research startup Listen Labs in a reported $2B deal

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