UK Competition and Markets Authority

Cloud computing was sold as locationless infrastructure, but the economics of leaving it are becoming conspicuously geographic. Within the same hyperscaler, the rights and price attached to moving data can now turn on account country, billing address, source region, network path, the purpose of the transfer, who owns the destination, which service is being moved and whether the customer followed the prescribed procedure. The “postcode” is contractual geography, not a literal postal code. For buyers, the important change is that portability can no longer be understood from a headline egress price alone.

IBM's HashiCorp acquisition moved from a pending strategic transaction to effective control in February 2025. The critical shift was not only the $6.4 billion price tag; it was IBM taking ownership of Terraform, Vault and the wider infrastructure automation portfolio at the moment enterprises were trying to standardize hybrid-cloud and AI infrastructure operations. The main question after closing is whether IBM can integrate HashiCorp with Red Hat and IBM automation software without weakening the developer trust and cloud-neutral posture that made HashiCorp valuable.