Today, IBM declared it’s buying HashiCorp, a big move valued at $6.4 billion. The deal is set to finish by the end of the year.
IBM will pay $35 for each share of HashiCorp. HashiCorp began in 2012 and went public in 2021. They’re famous for tools like Terraform for making infrastructure, Consul for networking, Nomad for managing containers, Vagrant for setting up environments, and Vault for managing secrets.
IBM’s CEO, Arvnind Krishna, says that as more advanced AI tech is used, managing complicated infrastructure is harder. HashiCorp helps with that by automating and securing cloud systems.
IBM says HashiCorp will work alongside Red Hat, a company they already own. They won’t mix HashiCorp into Red Hat.
Krishna says HashiCorp’s tech will boost demand for Red Hat stuff and other IBM software.
HashiCorp’s move to change Terraform’s license upset the open source community. Some people even started a new version called OpenTofu. But IBM didn’t talk about this during the announcement.
IBM says they’re big fans of open source. They’re not saying much more until the deal is done at the end of the year.
IBM might become a big player in open source automation with this buy. Terraform was a big deal before, and now IBM owns it.
