EU antitrust regulators have announced that they will decide by February 10 whether to approve the acquisition of Israeli cloud security company Wiz by Google. While legal and competition experts assess that they will approve the deal for fear of US pressure, theoretically they could decide not to decide, and open an antitrust inquiry that will defer the decision and make the whole process less pleasant for all concerned.
In the past few days, several organizations have petitioned the European Commission to open such an investigation, among them SOMO (the Center for Research on Multinational Corporations), human rights organization Article19, Balanced Economy Project, Rebalance Now, and the Open Markets Institute. The petition comes not long after Hilary Jennings, a former senior official in the UK Office of Fair Trading (now the Competition and Markets Authority), published similar arguments on a site dealing with privacy and digital rights.
The main argument repeatedly made by opponents of the deal relates to the access that Wiz will give Google to the cloud data security layer of European companies. The objectors fear that this access will be exploited to eliminate competitors in cloud and cybersecurity and increase dependence on Google, create a preference for Wiz as a cyber solution within a Google environment, and take advantage of the data that Wiz gathers on its customers. This will make migration from Wiz or from Google’s cloud service to competitors more difficult and raise costs for customers.
In an article on the Tech Policy website, Jennings and others write that “If Google acquires Wiz, this neutral multi-cloud visibility would (sic) be absorbed into a single hyperscaler’s ecosystem, enabling Google to align Wiz’s products and roadmap with its own cloud strategy.” The article also raises the fear that “Wiz’s multi-cloud deployment gives it deep insight into how organisations configure and secure their systems. Once integrated into Google, that insight could be used to reinforce both Google’s cloud and AI businesses.” It adds that “Some investors have described Wiz as a Trojan horse, giving Google visibility into rival clouds that no competitor could replicate.”
Shortly after the Google-Wiz deal was announced in March, addressing this fear, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said that multiple cloud approaches were something that Google customers wanted, and that they did not want to be locked into a single provider.
RELATED ARTICLES
Israel Tax Authority demands tax on Wiz IP
How branding helped drive Wizs $32 billion exit
Will regulators block the Google-Wiz deal?
Why Google is paying so much for Wiz
If all goes smoothly and the objections are dismissed, Wiz employees and investors will be able to breathe a sigh of relief on February 10, and benefit from the biggest exit in history, the acquisition of a barely six year-old company for $32 billion in cash. The four founders alone, Assaf Rappaport, Ami Luttwak, Yinon Costica, and Roy Reznik will pocket $1.5 billion each before tax.
No response to the report was forthcoming from Wiz.
Published by Globes, Israel business news – en.globes.co.il – on January 29, 2026.
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd., 2026.
