IBM has agreed to buy Confluent for $11 billion. 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.
IDC estimates that more than one billion new logical applications will emerge by 2028, reshaping technology architectures across industries. To fuel meaningful outcomes and drive productivity in operations, these applications, as well as AI agents, need access to connected and trusted data – in real time.
“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.”
The real-time nature of Confluent’s platform is critical for organizations as they leverage data living across all IT environments. Confluent addresses the challenges of today’s technology and data landscape. Confluent excels at preparing data for AI, keeping it clean and connected across systems and applications, eliminating silos inherent in agentic AI.
In the last four years alone, Confluent’s total addressable market (TAM) has doubled from $50 billion to $100 billion in 2025. Confluent’s real-time data and event streaming capabilities, combined with IBM’s AI infrastructure software and Automation offerings, will better position the companies to capture this opportunity.
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