The first half of 2026 has been a record-shattering period for corporate dealmaking, with global M&A volume blowing past $3 trillion. That’s a 44% jump compared to the same stretch last year, and the numbers tell a very specific story: big companies are spending enormous sums to own pieces of the AI economy.
There were 44 deals announced in the first six months of this year that exceeded $10 billion each. The full-year total is projected to approach $4 trillion, which would make 2026 one of the most active M&A years in modern financial history.
The AI arms race is driving the spending
Roughly a quarter of the largest transactions are motivated specifically by AI-driven initiatives. Companies aren’t buying revenue streams so much as they’re buying infrastructure, chips, data centers, and software platforms that power artificial intelligence workloads.
Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft are collectively projected to spend more than $700 billion on AI-related capital expenditures in 2026. SpaceX’s $60 billion deal stands as one of the headline transactions of the year. Salesforce completed a $3.6 billion acquisition of its own.
