The News
Call it an act of Wiz-ardry: a dead deal has come back to life, with a $9 billion bump. Google will buy cybersecurity startup Wiz for $32 billion, its largest acquisition and a signal that the M&A market isn’t so dead for the right kind of company.
Wiz hit $700 million in annual recurring revenue recently, according to people familiar with the matter, up from the $500 million it reported in 2024. That helps explain the bump in price from August, when a $23 billion sale to Google fell apart near the finish line.
The renewed deal will be a test for Trump’s regulators, who have so far sounded every bit as skeptical of corporate consolidation as Biden’s. The Justice Department earlier this month is continuing to push for a breakup of Google’s search business and the company, like much of Big Tech, has faced criticism over perceived slights against conservatives on its platforms.
Neither Google’s acquisition of Mandiant nor Cisco’s $28 billion Splunk deal faced antitrust scrutiny from Biden’s antitrust cops, but the Trump administration has held merger approval as a bargaining chip in unrelated standoffs with companies. The head of the Federal Communications Commission has not-so-subtly yoked approval for Verizon’s takeover of Frontier to the telecom giant backing off workforce-diversity goals.
The Wiz $32 billion deal is unlikely to be the last big cyber deal we see; Amazon explored a deal for Wiz both times it was running a process, according to people familiar with the matter (the e-commerce giant declined to comment.) All the big tech companies have plenty of cash to burn — $101 billion at Amazon, $78 billion at Meta, and $72 billion for Microsoft.
Semafor’s Rachyl Jones contributed reporting.
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Rohan’s view
Despite the market downturn, there are dealmaking opportunities for companies that present themselves as national security champions and skirt antitrust scrutiny. Google executives are emphasizing that national-security angle. “Organizations of all sizes — from startups and large enterprises to governments and public sector organizations — can use Wiz to protect” against cyberattacks, the company wrote in a blog post, a not-so-subtle reminder for staffers at State, Treasury, and Commerce, all of which suffered big breaches in the last two years.
Hewlett Packard Enterprises and Juniper Networks came late to that same play. They have defended their $14 billion merger, which the Justice Department sued to block in the first week of the Trump administration, as creating a bulwark against China’s Huawei in the global battle for 5G supremacy.
Room for Disagreement
Cloud computing was a focus for Biden’s antitrust cops and remains important to European regulators. An acquisition like this — for a fast-growing, disruptive company with a big client list — is exactly the kind of deal that has gotten other big tech companies in trouble. And despite the warm vibes that Silicon Valley has been sending Trump’s way, both he and Vice President Vance are no fans of big tech, so landing the national security pitch will be key.
Notable
- Retaining talent during these kinds of deals is hard: former Splunk CEO Gary Steele decamped for an upstart AI company last week, leaving a plum role running Cisco’s go-to-market teams.
- The deal provides an opening for Microsoft to go after Google in the EU, just as Google went after Microsoft last year.