The Data Clean Room Market Is Consolidating Fast — And That Might Be a Good Thing

For the past three years, data clean rooms were the ad industry's answer to every privacy-related measurement challenge. Can't match user-level data? Clean room. Need cross-platform measurement? Clean room. Want to activate first-party data with a media partner? Clean room.

But the standalone clean room era is ending. As AdExchanger declared in a recent analysis: 2025 marked the end of the data clean room era — not because clean rooms are going away, but because they're being absorbed into larger platforms.

The Acquisition Wave

The consolidation happened fast:

LiveRamp acquired Habu, one of the most prominent independent clean room startups. Habu's technology is now being integrated into LiveRamp's broader data connectivity platform, giving LiveRamp clean room capabilities alongside its identity resolution and data onboarding services.

WPP acquired InfoSum in 2024, bringing another major independent clean room provider into a holding company's ecosystem. InfoSum's decentralized approach to data matching — where data never leaves its owner's environment — is now part of WPP's data infrastructure.

NIQ launched a global data clean room on Snowflake in October 2025, enabling data enrichment and outcome measurement for marketers, media owners, retail media networks, and ad tech platforms. This represents a different model — building clean room functionality on top of existing cloud data infrastructure rather than operating as a standalone platform.

What's Driving Consolidation

The clean room market was always going to consolidate for a simple reason: clean rooms are a feature, not a product. Advertisers don't wake up wanting "a clean room." They want to measure campaign effectiveness, match their customer data to a publisher's audience, or run a reach analysis across platforms. Clean rooms are the plumbing that enables those use cases.

The standalone clean room pitch — "bring your data to our neutral environment" — struggled because it required both parties to adopt yet another platform. When clean room capabilities are embedded in platforms advertisers already use (a DSP, a data onboarding service, a cloud data warehouse), adoption friction drops dramatically.

What Survives

The clean room concept isn't dying — it's maturing. The key partnerships and integrations tell you where things are heading:

Market Projections

Despite — or perhaps because of — the consolidation, the data clean room market is projected to grow from $2 billion in 2025 to $10 billion by 2033, according to Data Insight Market research. The growth will come from clean rooms embedded in larger platforms, not from standalone providers.

What This Means for Measurement Teams

If you've been evaluating standalone clean room vendors, the landscape has shifted. The question is no longer "which clean room provider should we pick?" but rather "which platforms in our existing stack offer clean room capabilities, and do they connect to the media partners we need?"

Start with your largest media partners and work backward: what measurement use cases do you need, and what data infrastructure connects you to those partners? The answer increasingly runs through your cloud data warehouse, your identity partner, or your DSP — not a standalone clean room.