Should the DOJ Have Approved Google’s $32 Billion Wiz Acquisition?

This article is sponsored by Career Angel.ai!

Should the DOJ Have Approved Google’s $32 Billion Wiz Acquisition?

The Headline and the Hidden Question

The U.S. Department of Justice just gave Alphabet Inc. the green light to close its $32 billion acquisition of Wiz, an Israeli cloud-security powerhouse. It’s Google’s largest purchase ever and one of the biggest cybersecurity deals in history.

But buried beneath the celebration is a real question:

Should the DOJ have actually approved it?

Because while Wiz brings valuable cloud-security tech into Google’s portfolio, the deal also deepens Google’s control over the infrastructure, identity, and compliance layers that make up the modern digital economy.

What the Deal Is (and Isn’t)

Buyer: Alphabet Inc. (GOOG)
Target: Wiz — founded in 2020, quickly became a leading cloud-security platform used by enterprises across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
Value: ~$32 billion (Alphabet’s largest acquisition ever).
Goal: Expand Google Cloud’s security stack, integrating threat-detection and compliance visibility directly into the platform.

At face value, it looks like an ordinary scale-up: a big tech platform acquiring a smaller, fast-growing partner to bolster product capabilities.

But in the context of Big Tech consolidation, cloud-infrastructure dominance, and data-sovereignty politics, it’s anything but ordinary.

**The Case for Approval**

1. Wiz Is Complementary, Not a Direct Competitor

Wiz sells security software, not compute capacity. Its product runs on top of cloud infrastructure, including Google Cloud Platform—but also AWS and Azure. The DOJ likely determined there was no horizontal overlap with Google’s core business.

2. Cybersecurity Scale Matters

In an era of escalating cyberattacks and state-sponsored intrusions, integrating best-in-class security tools into hyperscale infrastructure arguably strengthens national and enterprise resilience.

3. The Global Context

Israel’s tech ecosystem is geopolitically strategic to U.S. allies. Blocking the deal might have signaled hostility toward allied innovation investment—a poor message when Western countries are trying to counter Chinese and Russian cyber capabilities.

4. Market Share Balance

Google Cloud remains the #3 hyperscaler (behind AWS and Microsoft Azure). Acquiring Wiz helps Google compete, not dominate. The DOJ could reasonably view this as pro-competitive within the broader cloud triopoly, not anti-competitive.

**The Case against Approval**

1. Cloud Security Is Infrastructure, Not Just Software

Wiz isn’t just an app—it’s a cross-cloud visibility layer used by thousands of enterprises to secure AWS, Azure, and GCP simultaneously.
Once owned by Google, its neutrality disappears. Enterprises might hesitate to use Wiz on AWS, pushing them toward Google’s ecosystem—a subtle but powerful form of lock-in.

2. Vertical Integration Risks

Alphabet now owns:

The cloud platform (GCP)
The AI compute layer (TPUs, Vertex AI)
And the cross-platform security visibility layer (Wiz)

That combination gives Google end-to-end visibility over customer workloads. In an industry where data access equals leverage, it’s a structural advantage that competitors can’t easily replicate.

3. Precedent Creep in Big Tech M&A

Regulators spent years dissecting Meta’s and Microsoft’s smaller acquisitions—yet allowed Google to buy a $32 billion cybersecurity company with almost no pushback.
This risks sending the message that scale itself is no longer a red flag, undermining the credibility of recent antitrust crackdowns.

4. The Innovation Choke-Point

Wiz was one of the fastest-growing independent security startups in history, valued at over $10 billion within four years. Its success proved there’s room for new entrants—until Big Tech bought it.
By absorbing innovators instead of competing with them, hyperscalers flatten the innovation curve in sectors critical to data privacy and infrastructure resilience.

The Bigger Picture: Antitrust Meets Cyber Policy

This isn’t a standard “tech merger.” It sits at the intersection of three major macro themes:

Digital Sovereignty – Governments want domestic control over security and data pipelines. Consolidating them under one U.S. tech giant adds global dependency risk.
AI Infrastructure Arms Race – Security is now part of AI compliance. Owning Wiz gives Google direct access to compliance datasets that could feed its AI trust-and-safety stack.
Cross-Cloud Competition – Wiz’s customers span all clouds. Alphabet can quietly prioritize Google optimization, reducing interoperability over time.

Each theme raises a policy question larger than one deal: how much vertical control is too much in digital infrastructure?

The Economic and Market Angle

Short-term: Positive for Alphabet investors. Wiz adds differentiated capabilities and high-margin subscription revenue.
Medium-term: Increases switching costs for enterprises, potentially boosting GCP’s growth trajectory.
Long-term: May attract renewed scrutiny if AWS or Azure lose share due to security-integration bias.
Private-market impact: Reduces exit optionality for independent cybersecurity startups—consolidation usually means fewer IPO paths, more dependency on strategic buyers.

The Verdict

Did the DOJ make a legally defensible call? Probably.
Did it make a strategically wise one? Debatable.

Approving Google’s purchase of Wiz aligns with short-term national-security logic and global-competition optics—but it also cements a long-term concentration of power in cloud infrastructure that regulators will likely regret later.

Wiz’s neutrality was its value.
Once it belongs to Google, neutrality vanishes—and the line between platform and regulator, between infrastructure and oversight, blurs a little more.

Bottom Line

The DOJ’s approval may look pragmatic, but it risks repeating the same mistake regulators made twenty years ago with search and social media: underestimating how platform integration becomes structural dominance.

For now, the market will cheer the deal. But the next time enterprises wonder why every cloud service, AI workload, and security tool runs through one of three companies, we’ll remember this as the moment when “competition” quietly merged into consolidation.

In short: the Wiz deal might be legal—
but that doesn’t mean it’s good for the market.

DISCLAIMER: This analysis of the aforementioned stock security is in no way to be construed, understood, or seen as formal, professional, or any other form of investment advice. We are simply expressing our opinions regarding a publicly traded entity.

MACROHINT

MACROHINT

Should the DOJ Have Approved Google’s $32 Billion Wiz Acquisition?