IBM Completes $11.5B Confluent Acquisition, Positioning Real-Time Data as AI Agent Engine

IBM closed its acquisition of Confluent, the data streaming platform used by 40% of the Fortune 500. The deal positions real-time event streaming as the data backbone for enterprise AI agents. Combined with MCP's 97M monthly SDK downloads and NVIDIA's OpenShell, the agentic infrastructure stack is rapidly consolidating around a few major platforms.