(Reuters) – Alphabet announced Tuesday the acquisition of the Israeli Wiz cybersecurity start -up for $ 32 billion, which represents its largest operation ever carried out, while Google’s parent company focuses on cybersecurity to strengthen its advantage in the dematerialized computer race against Amazon.com and Microsoft.

The buyout price is much higher than the 23 billion dollars that the American group had offered for Wiz last year, before concerns oblige the startup to end the negotiations.

The operation, entirely in cash, will strengthen Google’s “cloud” activity with cybersecurity solutions based on Wiz artificial intelligence, which should help it be more competitive in a sector benefiting from the development of generative AI services such as Chatgpt.

A severe regulatory environment has made it difficult for many companies to make major transactions in 2024, but Wall Street is optimistic about the abandonment by the new Trump administration of certain anti-trust policies.

Wiz offers cybersecurity solutions based on the cloud and was estimated at $ 12 billion during a round last May.

The interest in the cybersecurity sector has increased since the global Crowdstrike IT failure hit the activities of various sectors last year, encouraging companies to invest massively in the protection of their websites.

This buy -back agreement is the latest concluded by Google to strengthen its cybersecurity offers.

WIZ works with the main cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Oracle as well as Google Cloud, and counts Morgan Stanley, BMW and LVMH luxury giant among its customers.

Google expects the agreement to be concluded in 2026.

Wiz will join Google’s “Cloud” unit, while its products will continue to be available on all other major “Cloud” services.

(Report Deborah Sophia and Zaheer Kachwala in Bangalore; Diana Mandiá, edited by Zhifan Liu)

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