Silver Lake in talks to acquire Workday

Workday announced a €175m investment in Dublin last year, with plans to create 200 jobs.

US private equity firm Silver Lake is reportedly in talks to acquire HR platform Workday. Yesterday’s (13 August) report from Reuters sent the company’s shares surging nearly 18pc, hiking up Workday’s market capitalisation by several billions to above $50bn.

The two businesses have held acquisition talks in recent months, but a final deal is yet to emerge, sources told the publication. Silver Lake could tap additional investors for a joint acquisition.

The private equity firm, last year, bought video game giant Electronic Arts (EA) for $55bn with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and Affinity Partners, a private equity firm founded by Jared Kushner – marking the largest acquisition deal of 2025.

Silver Lake is also one of the three managing investors behind the TikTok US wing alongside Oracle and MGX. The venture capital company has backed major technology and software companies, including Dell, Airtable, India’s Jio Platforms, Stripe and Waymo.

Prior to the report, Workday was valued at around $43bn, with its shares having fallen around 15pc so far this year and more than 40pc from its 2024 peak.

Like many, the company has made major bets on AI. Though Morgan Stanley, in a recent report, found that those initiatives is unlikely to drive meaningful growth acceleration yet in the near term for Workday.

“Many of the company’s AI offerings remain in the early stages of deployment, and adoption is likely to progress more slowly than investors expect given the compliance, governance, and change-management requirements associated with back-office workflows,” Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Wood said last month.

The enterprise software company posted $2.5bn in revenue in its first quarter of fiscal 2026, up 13.5pc since last year. Revenue growth, however, has slowed in recent years. The company also repurchased around $1.6bn worth of common stock back from shareholders.

“Our core business is strong, our AI strategy is working, and we’re moving with the speed and focus required to lead,” company CEO and chair Aneel Bhusri said in the earnings release in May.

Last year, the company announced a €175m investment in Dublin with plans to create more than 200 specialised roles to the company around AI, machine learning, cybersecurity and engineering.

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