Google buys cloud security provider Wiz for $32 billion

Google is acquiring cloud security company Wiz for $32 billion — the biggest such deal in the tech giant’s history and also the largest corporate acquisition overall this year.

Google parent Alphabet announced the deal Tuesday morning after multiple outlets, including the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal, had reported progress on the purchase Monday evening. The tech giant previously was in talks last year to acquire Wiz, but for about $10 billion less.

Alphabet said New York-based Wiz will be folded into Google Cloud, a unit that also includes the incident response and threat intelligence subsidiary Mandiant. The deal is subject to review by federal antitrust regulators. 

Wiz’s expertise lies in taking inventory of customers' cloud assets — infrastructure like virtual machines and software containers — and providing security “from code to runtime.” The company was already a prominent partner of Google Cloud services.

Wiz co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Assaf Rappaport said in a blog post that Wiz will continue to work with other cloud providers outside of Google, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Oracle.

Bringing in Wiz will help Google Cloud “provide customers with better security for enterprise systems and lower the cost of maintaining a strong security posture across their on-premises and multicloud environments,” said Thomas Kurian, the unit’s CEO, in a blog post.

Founded in 2020, Wiz grew quickly and drew backing from Silicon Valley venture capitalists like Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. Reports said last year that Rappaport had considered taking the company public.

“Becoming part of Google Cloud is effectively strapping a rocket to our backs: it will accelerate our rate of innovation faster than what we could achieve as a standalone company,” Rappaport said Tuesday.