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Silver Lake is reportedly in talks to buy Workday and take it private, according to Reuters. If it happens, this would rank among the largest software buyouts ever. Nothing is signed yet, and there’s no competing bidder on the table as far as anyone knows.
The numbers being floated are a bit fuzzy depending on the report. One figure puts the deal around $43 billion; another has Workday’s market value jumping to roughly $51.1 billion after the news broke. Either way, shares moved hard — up as much as 25% at one point, enough to trigger a trading halt.
That jump matters because of where Workday’s stock had been. It was down about 15% for the year and more than 40% off its 2024 peak, largely because investors have been nervous about whether Workday’s seat-based SaaS pricing model can survive AI automating away the very jobs those seats represent. If a company needs fewer HR and finance staff, it needs fewer Workday licenses. That’s the fear, anyway.
What’s interesting here is what a Silver Lake deal would actually signal. Silver Lake has a track record of scooping up software companies it thinks the market has mispriced, and this would fit that pattern — a bet that the AI panic dragging down enterprise software stocks is overblown, or at least overdone in Workday’s case. Main Capital raising a €5.25 billion fund to make similar bets suggests Silver Lake isn’t alone in thinking this way.
It also fits a broader pattern this year. Hg Capital paid $6.4 billion for OneStream. Thoma Bravo paid $12.3 billion for Dayforce. Private equity firms are clearly trying to figure out what traditional software businesses are worth now that AI is scrambling the old assumptions about growth and headcount-based pricing.
Workday itself isn’t struggling, exactly — founded in 2005 by former PeopleSoft executives, it pulled in $9.6 billion in fiscal 2025 revenue, up 13%. But that’s down from 16% growth the year before, and slowing growth at a company priced for the cloud-software era is exactly the kind of thing that makes it an attractive take-private target. Buy it while it’s cheap, restructure without quarterly earnings calls breathing down your neck, figure out the AI-era pricing model in private.
None of this is confirmed. Talks could fall apart, another bidder could show up, or Workday could stay public and prove the skeptics wrong on its own. But the fact that this conversation is happening at all tells you something about how spooked the market is about seat-based software pricing in an AI world — and how confident some investors are that the fear is a buying opportunity.

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Silver Lake is reportedly in talks to take Workday private, a deal that could rank among the largest software buyouts ever, with figures floated around $43-51 billion. Workday shares jumped as much as 25%, triggering a trading halt. The talks come amid investor worry that AI could shrink demand for Workday's seat-based HR/finance software licenses, following similar private equity moves this year like Hg Capital's $6.4B OneStream buy and Thoma Bravo's $12.3B Dayforce acquisition. Workday grew revenue 13% to $9.6B in fiscal 2025, down from 16% growth the prior year. Nothing is confirmed and no competing bidder has surfaced.

Silver Lake in talks to take Workday private