IBM closes $6.4B HashiCorp acquisition

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 T ... Read full article.