Crowds walk through midtown Manhattan on Oct. 16, 2025 in New York City.
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The annual global deal value of mergers and acquisitions is on track to reach $4 trillion in 2026, making it the strongest year since 2021, thanks to bigger megadeals fueled by the ongoing AI demand surge, according to a PwC report.
M&A transactions above $5 billion have contributed almost half of total global deal value so far this year, PwC said. It expects a 40% year-on-year rise in deal values from megadeals in 2026 if the current pace continues.
“2026 is the year M&A supersized,” said Brian Levy, global deals industries leader at PwC US, adding that AI is propelling megadeals, redirecting capital and shuffling sector winners and losers.
“AI is intensifying the K-shaped M&A market and it is forcing dealmakers to radically rethink how deals get done,” Levy added.
Hurdles will likely remain for mid-market dealmakers. “Many mid-market dealmakers remain constrained by geopolitical uncertainty, valuation gaps, slowing growth, higher inflation and interest rates, and a private equity exit backlog that remains stubbornly high,” PwC said.
If global M&A value reaches $4 trillion by the end of 2026, it will have risen at least 13% year-on-year from 2025. That would represent the second-largest annual deal value since 2021, when deals exceeded $5 trillion, according to PwC. Transactions above $5 billion now account for 48% of global deal value, compared with 39% in 2025 and 26% in 2024, PwC’s data showed.
Some of the biggest M&A deals this year have involved AI, including purchases announced by SpaceX and Salesforce in the past month.
Elon Musk-owned SpaceX entered a formal agreement to buy artificial intelligence startup Cursor for $60 billion, which could boost its efforts to compete with peers like Anthropic and OpenAI.
Salesforce, a software-as-a-service company, is buying AI customer service platform Fin for $3.6 billion to boost its agentic offering, as it grapples with concerns that new AI tools will make its business model obsolete.
Meanwhile, tech giant Qualcomm is in talks to acquire Modular, in a move that would value the AI chip firm at about $4 billion, according to Bloomberg.
“Over time, AI could make private markets more liquid by making assets easier to evaluate and trade,” PwC said, adding that the deal process will revolve around both AI-enabled insight and human judgement.
“That is where trust will sit.”
—CNBC’s Ashley Capoot and Samantha Subin contributed to the story.
