Most significant networking acquisitions of 2025

This year is shaping up to be an active one for mergers and acquisitions. Goldman Sachs says 2025 is on pace to become the second-biggest in history for announced M&As, Reuters reports.

In the networking arena, some of the biggest deals of 2025 were a long time coming — it took more than 18 months for HPE to finally close the Juniper Networks deal, for example. Some come with blockbuster price tags (like Palo Alto Networks’ $25 billion CyberArk buy), while others are less costly but still impactful. Many of the deals revolve around AI capabilities and enabling vendors to develop more robust systems for accessing and securing distributed resources.

Here are more than a dozen of this year’s acquisitions, organized alphabetically by acquirer, that will help shape the future of enterprise networking.

Akamai acquires Fermyon

This month Akamai announced plans to acquire WebAssembly startup Fermyon for an undisclosed sum as the company looks to expand its own edge capabilities. Fermyon helped to develop Wasm beyond its browser foundation for server-side and edge deployments. The deal could bring more users to Wasm, which is gaining momentum as the WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) specification nears standardization.

Arista buys VeloCloud

Arista Networks acquired Broadcom’s VeloCloud SD-WAN business in July for an undisclosed sum. For Arista, the SD-WAN buy fills one of the few networking gaps the company had and boosts its SD-WAN, SASE and branch networking plans. And those plans are big: CEO Jayshree Ullal said Arista’s campus and WAN business is expected to grow from the current $750 million to $1.25 billion by the end of 2026.

AT&T buys Lumen

AT&T in May announced plans to acquire Lumen’s Mass Markets fiber business. This deal, worth $5.75 billion, is an example of how important carriers see fiber optic technology, particularly as they look to handle the expected traffic increases spurred by AI. The Lumen Mass Markets fiber assets included in the deal total about 1 million fiber subscribers across more than 4 million fiber locations, according to AT&T. 

Cisco makes two AI deals: EzDubs and NeuralFabric

Last month Cisco completed its acquisition of EzDubs, a privately held AI software company with speech-to-speech translation technology. EzDubs translates conversations across 31 languages and will accelerate Cisco’s delivery of next-generation features, such as live voice translation that preserves the characteristics of speech, the vendor stated. Cisco plans to incorporate EzDubs’ technology in its Cisco Collaboration portfolio. Also in November, Cisco bought AI platform company NeuralFabric, which offers a generative AI platform that lets organizations develop domain-specific small language models using their own proprietary data.

Coreweave buys Core Scientific

Nvidia-backed AI cloud provider CoreWeave acquired crypto miner Core Scientific for about $9 billion, giving it access to 1.3 gigawatts of contracted power to support growing demand for AI and high-performance computing workloads. CoreWeave said the deal augments its vertical integration by expanding its owned and operated data center footprint, allowing it to scale GPU-powered services for enterprise and research customers.

F5 picks up three: CalypsoAI, Fletch and MantisNet

F5 acquired Dublin, Ireland-based CalypsoAI for $180 million. CalypsoAI’s platform creates what the company calls an Inference Perimeter that protects across models, vendors, and environments. F5 says it will integrate CalypsoAI’s adaptive AI security capabilities into its F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP).

F5’s ADSP also stands to gain from F5’s acquisition of agentic AI and threat management startup Fletch. Fletch’s technology turns external threat intelligence and internal logs into real-time, prioritized insights; its agentic AI capabilities will be integrated into ADSP, according to F5.

Lastly, F5 grabbed startup MantisNet to enhance cloud-native observability in F5’s ADSP. MantisNet leverages extended Berkeley Packet Filer (eBPF)-powered, kernel-level telemetry to provide real-time insights into encrypted protocol activity and allow organizations “to gain visibility into even the most elusive traffic, all without performance overhead,” according to an F5 blog post.

HPE makes it official with Juniper

Finalized in July, this $13.4 billion deal basically doubled HPE’s networking business while bolstering its AI technologies. The transaction set the stage for offering a combined portfolio spanning enterprise campus, data center, service provider, and cloud networking segments, according to the Futurum Group. “The deal creates opportunities for integrated network security offerings spanning firewall, service edge, and zero-trust architectures,” the analyst firm wrote after the close of the deal. “The combined entity will compete in both ‘AI for networks’ and ‘networks for AI’ market opportunities.”

IBM finalizes HashiCorp deal

IBM’s $6.4 billion buy of HashiCorp, finalized in February, will infuse HashiCorp automation and security technology in every data center possible, Big Blue said. IBM plans to integrate HashiCorp’s automation technology into its Red Hat, watsonx, data security, IT automation, and consulting businesses. HashiCorp’s products include its flagship Terraform package, which lets customers provision infrastructure, network, and virtual components across multiple cloud providers and on-premises environments.

Netgear acquires Exium

In June 2025, Netgear acquired the privately held security vendor Exium to expand its SASE offerings. Known as a networking hardware vendor for consumers, Netgear is increasingly focused on delivering enterprise-grade security solutions for SMEs. “What I see as an opportunity, uniquely for Netgear, given what our roots are, is to address the needs of small and medium enterprise customers,” Pramod Badjate, president and general manager of Netgear for Business,told Network World. “They have a unique need where they want the same level of reliability as a large enterprise expects [and] they also expect support.”

Nokia purchases Infinera

This $2.3 billion deal brought Nokia a ton more optical and dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) technology that it will use to bolster its hyperscaler and carrier class offerings.

Palo Alto Networks grabs CyberArk

Announced in July, this $25 billion deal gives Palo Alto a significant boost for its network access and identity management portfolio. “Palo Alto is positioning this acquisition as the ultimate leap toward securing machine and agent identities – one of the hottest frontiers in the rapidly emerging era of AI-driven threats,” the Everest Group wrote in a blog post about the acquisition. “It signals a seismic shift in how the biggest cybersecurity providers hope to position themselves as indispensable partners for the AI-powered enterprise.”

Qualcomm takes Alphawave Semi

Looking to expand its data center networking and compute offerings, Qualcomm grabbed British hardware maker Alphwave Semi for $2.4 billion. Alphawave Semi has a variety of wired connectivity and compute technologies, including custom silicon, chiplets, ASIC, and semiconductor intellectual property. The goal is to pair Qualcomm processors with Alphawave’s high-speed connectivity and compute technologies to support increasingly intense AI workloads. “If you wanted a super strong indicator that Qualcomm was serious about playing in the datacenter CPU market, this is it,” said Matt Kimball, vice president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, when the deal was announced in June.