Pull to refresh
Logo
Daily Brief
Following
Why Sign Up
Rob Thomas

Rob Thomas

Senior Vice President, Software and Chief Commercial Officer, IBM

Appears in 1 story

Stories

IBM’s $11 billion Confluent bet: owning the data arteries of enterprise AI

Money Moves

Public champion of Confluent as infrastructure for the AI economy

IBM has agreed to acquire Confluent, the data‑streaming company built around Apache Kafka, in an all‑cash deal valuing Confluent at about $11 billion, or $31 per share—a roughly 34% premium to its last close. IBM says Confluent’s real‑time event streaming and governance capabilities will anchor a new “smart data platform” that connects, cleans, and orchestrates data across hybrid clouds for generative and agentic AI applications, positioning IBM not just as an AI model provider but as the owner of the data plumbing that makes enterprise AI work.

Updated Dec 11, 2025