IBM is buying data infrastructure company Confluent for $11 billion in cash in a bid to bolster its data and automation products as ever more companies move their tech operations to the cloud and deploy AI technology.

The tech giant said it would offer $31 for each Confluent share, which is about 50% more than what the smaller company’s shares closed at on Friday, before news of the deal.

Confluent offers a platform that helps enterprises manage streams of data in real time, a use case that’s exploded in demand as ever more companies develop and deploy AI products, which require significant back-and-forth processing of data for inferencing.

IBM said Confluent will complement its existing data and automation products, as well as improve upon its existing offerings across AI, automation,

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