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IBM has finalized its multi-billion dollar HashiCorp acquisition, two days after the U.K.’s antitrust regulator gave the deal its blessing.
A spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) had quietly greenlighted the acquisition earlier this week prior to the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) on Tuesday.
Today’s announcement comes 10 months after IBM first revealed plans to pay $6.4 billion for HashiCorp, an enterprise software company best known for Terraform, an “infrastructure-as-code” tool for automating infrastructure provisioning and management across clouds.
Terraform was once available under an open source license, but HashiCorp controversially switched it to a proprietary license back in 2023 (which led to a community-driven fork called OpenTofu, which now lives under the auspices of the Linux Foundation). Such a license change likely made HashiCorp a more appealing acquisition prospect, giving suitors more control over how Terraform is used in 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) on-premises and across cloud providers, fits well with an IBM strategy that has evolved from on-prem systems to the cloud — a strategy that seems to be paying off.
Indeed, IBM is one of several legacy software companies riding the AI and cloud computing wave, with “Big Blue” currently sitting at an all-time high valuation of nearly $240 billion. And 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 HashiCorp acquisition also builds on other sizeable acquisitions, including IBM’s $34 billion Red Hat purchase in 2019, and the $4.6 billion it paid for Apptio in 2023.
Paul is a senior writer based in London, focused largely (but not exclusively) on the world of UK and European startups. He also writes about other subjects that he’s passionate about, such as the business of open source software. Prior to joining TechCrunch in June 2022, Paul had gained more than a decade’s experience covering consumer and enterprise technologies for The Next Web (now owned by the Financial Times) and VentureBeat. Pitches on: paul.sawers [at] techcrunch.com Secure/anon tip-offs via Signal: PSTC.08 See me on Bluesky: @jambo.bsky.social
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