Workday shares surged as much as 25% and were repeatedly halted for volatility last week after Reuters reported that private equity firm Silver Lake is in talks to acquire the human resources and finance software company, in a deal that would rank among the largest software buyouts on record. The stock closed the session at $206.45, pushing Workday's market value to roughly $51.1 billion from about $43 billion before the report — its best single-day performance since 2016.
A rough year, reversed in an afternoon
The buyout speculation caps a difficult stretch for Workday. Shares had fallen approximately 15% in 2026 and remained more than 40% below their 2024 peak, weighed down by investor doubts about whether traditional enterprise software could hold up against a wave of AI-native competitors. Those doubts persisted even as Workday rolled out dozens of AI agents under its Illuminate platform, covering tasks from contract negotiation to recruiting and expense management, built on a dataset the company says spans more than a trillion transactions annually.
Founder Aneel Bhusri returned as chief executive in February, replacing Carl Eschenbach, with a mandate to prove the company's AI relevance to a market that had grown sceptical. According to people familiar with the matter, Silver Lake and Workday have held discussions about a potential transaction for several months, though the talks remain ongoing and there is no guarantee they result in a signed deal.
Why private equity is circling now
The interest fits a broader pattern of large software buyouts re-emerging after several quiet years, and reads as the mirror image of the 2026 IPO reopening: capital is available at scale, and issuers and owners are choosing between public and private routes on price rather than access. Earlier in 2026, Thoma Bravo agreed to acquire payroll software rival Dayforce for roughly $16 billion, and Hg Capital struck a deal in January to take financial software maker OneStream private for about $6.4 billion.
Silver Lake itself has a track record of large technology take-privates, including stakes in Dell Technologies and Qualtrics, and its roughly $55 billion acquisition of Electronic Arts last year alongside Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and Affinity Partners. People familiar with the Workday discussions say Silver Lake could again bring in co-investors to help finance a transaction of this scale.
The logic, according to dealmakers tracking the situation, is straightforward: a gap has opened between Workday's aggressive AI investment and a public market unwilling to reward it, which is precisely the kind of setup private equity firms look for when they believe they can extract value that public shareholders currently are not.
What Wall Street is watching next
Workday's 39 covering analysts were split roughly evenly before the report — 18 buy ratings, 5 outperform, 15 hold, and a handful of more cautious calls — with a mean price target around $171, some 17% below where the stock traded after the buyout report surfaced. That gap largely reflects timing: most analyst models have not yet been updated to reflect a potential takeover premium that materialised in a single afternoon. A year earlier, the same average target stood at $296; it fell by more than 40% over twelve months as AI disruption fears repriced software multiples across the sector, even as the number of analysts covering the stock grew.
For now, the deal remains speculative. Neither Silver Lake nor Workday has commented publicly, and transactions of this size routinely die in due diligence — particularly when, as one hedge-fund analyst tracking the situation put it, the central diligence question is what artificial intelligence ultimately does to the installed customer base. Whether or not a deal is signed, the episode has reopened a conversation among private equity allocators about whether large, AI-exposed software companies are worth re-underwriting after a year largely spent on the sidelines.