Google parent Alphabet Inc is in talks to acquire cybersecurity start-up Wiz Inc, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The transaction could total as much as US$23 billion , said the person, who asked not to be identified discussing non-public information. That would make it the tech giant’s largest acquisition to date.

An agreement hasn’t been reached and talks could still end without one, the person said.

A representative of Alphabet didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for Wiz declined to comment. The talks were reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal.

The talks come on the heels of Alphabet shelving efforts to acquire customer relationship management company HubSpot Inc, which Bloomberg News reported last week. As was the case with the HubSpot deal, a potential acquisition as large as that of Wiz is unusual for a big tech company like Alphabet, given the heightened scrutiny that the company faces by antitrust regulators.

Google already faces several antitrust challenges, including a lawsuit by the US Justice Department accusing it of abusing its dominant position in online search, and another one regarding its digital advertising tools. 

Alphabet has been ramping up its investment in its cloud customer business, including offering more generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools for clients. Though Google still lags behind Microsoft Corp and Amazon.com Inc in the market for cloud computing, the company reported that its cloud unit had been profitable in consecutive quarters, after years of the unit being a money-losing operation.

An acquisition of Wiz, a cloud and cybersecurity company, could help Google catch up to Microsoft and Amazon in an increasingly competitive cloud market.

As more start-ups are moving their apps and data to the cloud, the opportunity in the sector is growing, particularly as generative AI apps and tools continue to gain traction. Such tools often require enormous data sets to be uploaded to the cloud that AI models can train on, in order for them to be able to generate output like images, marketing campaigns or software code, based on what users prompt the generative AI software with.

New York-based Wiz connects to cloud storage providers such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, and identifies and scans data stored in the cloud, looking for and removing security risks. The company, founded in 2020, was valued at US$12 billion during a May funding round that drew investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Thrive Capital.

An Alphabet deal for Wiz would follow its US$5.4 billion purchase of cybersecurity firm Mandiant Inc in 2022. That was the company’s second-largest acquisition, topped only by its deal for Motorola Mobility Holdings LLC completed in 2012, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

  - Bloomberg