Confluent Stock Climbs on IBM Takeover Plan

By Kelly Cloonan

Shares of Confluent rose after International Business Machines agreed to acquire the data-infrastructure company for about $11 billion.

Confluent was up 29% at $29.73 on Monday. Shares are up 6.3% this year.

IBM said Monday it has agreed to pay $31 a share for Confluent, which provides technology that helps manage streams of real-time data used in big artificial-intelligence models.

Analysts said the deal makes sense given that Confluent has largely fallen behind in the artificial intelligence boom, and IBM offers a broad portfolio of data and open-source assets.

"We believe Confluent has not managed to prove its relevance in the shift to AI, and we view its technology as complementary and not core to AI adoption and data architectures," Oppenheimer analysts said in a note.

D.A. Davidson analysts, meanwhile, said that while IBM is not a surprising buyer, the timing of the deal is somewhat surprising as they would have expected Confluent to try to post several quarters of strong results, and boost its shares in the process, before selling.

"We would have figured the company would have held out for a while longer in hopes they could deliver strong results for more than just one quarter," the analysts said.

The acquisition likely won't change IBM's competitive setup with Snowflake, and other technology vendors likely won't compete for Confluent given its peripheral value to the AI and data ecosystem, the analysts added.

For IBM, Confluent looks like a natural fit as it addresses IBM's focus on eliminating data silos for powering AI, Wedbush Securities analysts said.

"We loudly applaud this deal," the analysts said, noting IBM will likely pursue more such acquisitions in the future.

Shares of IBM ticked up 0.7% to $310.12.

Write to Kelly Cloonan at kelly.cloonan@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

December 08, 2025 10:45 ET (15:45 GMT)