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The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has finished its investigation into IBM’s planned acquisition of HashiCorp. The CMA opened the inquiry on 30 December 2024, announced Phase 1 clearance on 25 February 2025, published its full decision on 3 April 2025, and lists the case as closed. It found no realistic prospect that the transaction would substantially lessen competition.
What the CMA decided
IBM agreed in April 2024 to acquire 100% of HashiCorp’s share capital. The CMA determined that the transaction created a relevant merger situation and that it had jurisdiction to review it. That jurisdictional finding is separate from the competition outcome: after assessing the evidence, the CMA did not refer the deal to a Phase 2 investigation.
The authority’s formal conclusion, in its decision dated 25 February 2025, was:
“The CMA has found that the acquisition by International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) of HashiCorp, Inc. (HashiCorp) is a relevant merger situation that does not give rise to a realistic prospect of a substantial lessening of competition.”
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The case record is available on the CMA’s IBM/HashiCorp merger inquiry page, and the full reasoning appears in the CMA’s full-text decision.
What products and market did the review cover?
The competitive analysis focused on paid infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tools used for multi-cloud provisioning and configuration. IaC software lets organizations define infrastructure and its settings in code rather than managing every environment manually.
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Terraform: infrastructure provisioning
HashiCorp’s Terraform was described as primarily designed to provision cloud infrastructure: creating and changing resources such as networks, compute instances and managed services across cloud providers.
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IBM’s Ansible, supplied through its wholly owned subsidiary Red Hat, was described as primarily focused on configuration and ongoing maintenance after infrastructure exists. Typical tasks include applying software settings, orchestrating changes and maintaining systems.
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Overlap, but usually complementary use
The CMA found some functional overlap, but customers generally viewed Terraform and Ansible as complementary rather than direct substitutes. A team might use Terraform to create an environment and Ansible to configure workloads running in it. That distinction limited the competitive significance of the parties’ combined position.
The CMA’s theories of possible harm
Loss of direct competition
The CMA examined whether combining IBM and HashiCorp would remove an important existing competitor, particularly in paid multi-cloud IaC tools. It found the products’ overlap was limited and that their rivalry was not an important driver of product development.
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Loss of innovation rivalry
The authority also considered whether the acquisition could eliminate meaningful competition to improve or expand the products. Its evidence did not indicate that Terraform and Ansible were sufficiently close innovation rivals for this theory to create a realistic prospect of a substantial lessening of competition.
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The CMA assessed whether IBM could use bundled discounts or other commercial tactics to disadvantage competing tools, or degrade interoperability between HashiCorp products and rival offerings. It concluded that neither foreclosure theory met the threshold for a Phase 2 reference on the evidence available.
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Why the 70–80% figure does not mean the deal was harmful
For its jurisdictional share-of-supply assessment, the CMA estimated that the parties had a combined 70–80% share by value in UK paid IaC multi-cloud tools, with an increment of 20–30%. These are the CMA’s estimates for that specifically defined segment, not a measure of all cloud infrastructure, all software or every IaC deployment.
The figure helped establish that the CMA could examine the transaction. It does not establish that the merger harmed competition. The substantive question was whether the deal created a realistic prospect of a substantial lessening of competition; the CMA answered no after reviewing the products, rivalry and foreclosure theories.
Investigation timeline
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| April 2024 | IBM agreed to acquire 100% of HashiCorp’s share capital. |
| 30 December 2024 | The CMA opened its merger inquiry and invited interested parties to comment. The comment period ran through 16 January 2025. |
| 25 February 2025 | The CMA announced Phase 1 clearance and issued its decision. |
| 3 April 2025 | The CMA published the full decision and updated the case record, which is listed as closed. |
What this means for readers and cloud-software customers
- The UK review is completed, not ongoing as of 28 September 2026.
- The CMA did not require a Phase 2 investigation or identify remedies in its Phase 1 outcome.
- The decision was about competitive effects in a defined paid IaC segment, not a finding about the quality, security or technical performance of Terraform or Ansible.
- Customers should not read the CMA’s market-share estimate as proof that IBM controls all cloud infrastructure tools.
Bottom line
The headline that IBM’s HashiCorp acquisition “now faces” a UK investigation is out of date. The CMA did investigate the anticipated acquisition, but it cleared the deal at Phase 1 in February 2025 and closed the case after publishing its full decision in April 2025. Its analysis found Terraform and Ansible more complementary than substitutable and found no realistic prospect of a substantial lessening of competition.
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