IBM has finalized its multi-billion dollar HashiCorp acquisition, two days after the U.K.s antitrust regulator gave the deal its blessing. Todays announcement comes 10 months after IBM first announced 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 Terraform is used in industry. At any rate, Terraforms ability to help companies provision their infrastructure (i.e. configure the various hardware, software, and network components required to run applications and services), across on-prem and cloud environments, fits well with an IBM strategy that has seen it evolve from on-prem systems to the cloud. In fact, IBM is one of several legacy software companies riding the AI and cloud computing wave, with Big Blue currently sitting at an all-time high valuation of nearly $240 billion. And with HashiCorp now under its wing, this will go some way toward bolstering its hybrid cloud credentials.Organizations globally are looking to deploy modern, hybrid cloud-ready apps, which require automated cloud infrastructure at significant scale, IBM executive Rob Thomas said in a statement. The HashiCorp acquisition also builds on other sizeable acquisitions, including IBMs $34 billion Red Hat purchase in 2019, and the $4.6 billion it paid for Apptio in 2023.