Google Seals $32 Billion Deal for Cyber Start-Up Wiz
The New York Times
The acquisition could make the Silicon Valley giant a bigger force in cybersecurity, and arrives months after an earlier round of talks collapsed.
Google agreed to buy Wiz, a fast-growing cybersecurity start-up, for $32 billion in the company’s biggest push to strengthen its cloud-computing business and expand beyond the search engine and consumer internet services that made it a household name.
The all-cash deal, announced on Tuesday, would be Google’s largest, easily surpassing its $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility in 2012.
With the deal, Google would get a five-year-old company that most consumers are unfamiliar with but that a growing number of businesses rely on to protect their cloud applications. The Silicon Valley giant worked for months last year to forge a deal for Wiz, which was most recently valued at $12 billion. In July, Wiz rejected Google’s $23 billion takeover offer, saying it wanted to pursue an initial public offering, which never came.
The splashy purchase, which the companies expect to close in 2026, would inject fresh momentum into Google Cloud, the division that sells computing services to other businesses. It would also be the tech giant’s most aggressive effort to keep up with rival Microsoft in cybersecurity.
In a conference call about the deal on Tuesday, Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, said the company was buying Wiz because it “is an innovative, leading cloud security platform.”
He added: “The pace and impact of breaches are accelerating. A.I. brings new risks, but also new opportunities” that Wiz could help with.
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