🚀 IBM acquires Confluent for $11B

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Market Overview
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Year To Date Performances:

1. IBM’s $11 billion all-cash acquisition of Confluent sent the data-streaming company’s stock soaring 29% as the tech giant agreed to pay $31 per share, positioning Confluent as the latest pillar in IBM’s aggressive AI-infrastructure strategy following its HashiCorp and Apptio deals. Confluent, which powers real-time data flows for more than 6,500 enterprise customers and partners with major AI and cloud players like Anthropic, AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, and Snowflake, gives IBM a critical engine for the “smart data platform” CEO Arvind Krishna says is necessary as global data volumes double by 2028. The acquisition—expected to close mid-2026—cements IBM’s bet that control of real-time data pipelines will be as essential to AI dominance as compute, and the market responded accordingly, even as IBM’s own shares dipped 1% on the news.

2. Berkshire Hathaway revealed a major shake-up ahead of Warren Buffett’s planned 2026 handoff. GEICO CEO Todd Combs is departing to join JPMorgan, where he will lead a new Security and Resiliency Initiative that will eventually deploy $1.5 trillion and begin with a $10 billion investing mandate. Combs, who has helped oversee Berkshire’s massive equity portfolio since 2010, leaves a meaningful gap in the firm’s post-Buffett transition plan, deepening questions about how holdings like Apple, Bank of America, and Coca-Cola will be managed once Greg Abel takes over as CEO. His exit comes alongside other structural changes, including the planned 2027 retirement of CFO Marc Hamburg and leadership reshuffling across GEICO, Berkshire Hathaway Energy, and NetJets, while JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon praised Combs as one of the greatest investors he has worked with, supported by an outside advisory council featuring Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell, Robert Gates, and Condoleezza Rice.

3. Ray Dalio says the Middle East is rapidly becoming a “Silicon Valley of capitalists” as the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar combine immense sovereign-wealth capital with a surge of global AI talent, driving multibillion-dollar cloud, data-center and AI infrastructure initiatives. The results include a $10 billion Google Cloud–PIF deal and the massive Stargate AI campus backed by OpenAI, Oracle, Nvidia and Cisco. Dalio described the region’s transformation as the product of long-term statecraft and said places like Abu Dhabi now have the same tech “buzz” once unique to San Francisco, attracting investment managers and innovators alike. But he warned that the next two years for the global economy will be “precarious,” citing bubble conditions in AI and private markets, deepening U.S. political conflict ahead of 2026, and crippling global debt cycles that governments can neither tax nor cut their way out of—adding that the true risk isn’t the bubble itself, but the moment tightening financial conditions finally “prick” it.

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