Confluent shares skyrocketed in premarket trading in New York after a Wall Street Journal report revealed that IBM is in talks to buy the data infrastructure company for $11 billion. The deal could be announced as soon as today.

Confluent is a data-infrastructure software company built around Apache Kafka, an open-source technology created at LinkedIn and later spun out. It offers a streaming data platform that lets companies move and process data in real time rather than in slow batches, which is vital for AI and machine-learning pipelines.

A successful deal would be IBM's largest in years, furthering its pivot toward AI and cloud after the $6.4 billion HashiCorp purchase last year. IBM has posted increasing consulting revenue, slashed thousands of jobs to restructure its workforce, and ramped up quantum computing development.

Shares of Confluent surged 28% in premarket trading. The stock is down 17% on the year as of Friday's close and has been range-bound since the second half of 2022.

The potential deal shows how IBM is continuing to pivot from its slow-growing legacy business and reshape itself around AI and quantum computing. It wants to be viewed as a serious player in AI infrastructure rather than just another legacy enterprise software vendor.