IBM has finalized its multi-billion dollar HashiCorp acquisition, two days after the U.K.’s antitrust regulator gave the deal its blessing.
Today’s announcement comes 10 months after IBM first announced plans to pay $6.4 billion for HashiCorp, an enterprise software company best known for Terraform, an “infrastructure-as-code” tool for provisioning and managing infrastructure across clouds.
Terraform was once available under an open source license, but HashiCorp controversially switched it to a proprietary license back in 2023. This in turn led to a community-driven fork called OpenTofu, which now lives under the auspices of the Linux Foundation.
Such a license change could have made HashiCorp a more appealing acquisition prospect, as it gives IBM more control over how Terraform is used across industry. At any rate, Terraform’s ability to help companies provision their infrastructure — i.e. configure the various hardware, software, and network components required to run applications and services — across on-prem and cloud environments fits well with IBM’s own strategy.
IBM is one of several legacy software companies riding the AI and cloud computing wave to great riches, with “Big Blue” currently sitting at an all-time high valuation of nearly $240 billion. With HashiCorp now under its wing, this will go some way toward bolstering its hybrid cloud credentials.
“Organizations globally are looking to deploy modern, hybrid cloud-ready apps, which require automated cloud infrastructure at significant scale,” IBM executive Rob Thomas said in a statement.
The acquisition also builds on IBM’s $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat in 2019, and its $4.6 billion Apptio acquisition from 2023.
