Overview
- The Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed sources, reports IBM is in advanced talks and a deal could be announced today, though it is not finalized.
- Neither IBM nor Confluent has commented, and Reuters and other outlets have not independently verified the report.
- The reported price of about $11 billion represents roughly a mid-30s percent premium to Confluent’s market value near $8.1 billion after Friday’s $23.14 close.
- Confluent provides an open-source-based platform for processing real-time data streams used across industries and to support large AI models.
- Confluent shares jumped roughly 20%–32% in after-hours and premarket trading, and the move would align with IBM’s software strategy following last year’s $6.4 billion HashiCorp acquisition.