Introduction
TMT dealmaking in 2025-2026 is a story of fewer, larger deals. Global TMT deal value rose 49% in 2025 to about $961 billion on flat volumes, according to PwC Italy's TMT M&A outlook, and technology supplied 26 of the 32 TMT transactions above $5 billion in PwC's global TMT deals review. The pattern sharpened in 2026: TMT value rose 48% year on year to $472 billion in the first five months while volumes fell 9%, and technology accounted for 15 of the 16 megadeals, per PwC's 2026 mid-year TMT outlook based on LSEG data. Artificial intelligence runs through almost every landmark deal.
- Megadeal
A megadeal is an M&A transaction large enough to be tracked separately from ordinary deal flow. PwC's deal reviews, built on LSEG data, set the threshold at $5 billion of deal value; some banks and data providers reserve the term for deals of $10 billion or more. Megadeal counts show how a few transactions can lift total value even as deal numbers fall.
The Landmark Deals of 2025-2026
The table ranks the period's defining transactions by headline value. Nearly every landmark announced in 2025 has since closed, so the open questions have moved from regulatory risk to integration and financing.
| Deal | Value | Status | Theme |
|---|---|---|---|
| SpaceX / xAI | xAI at ~$250B (as reported) | Combined Feb 2026, all-stock | AI consolidation |
| Paramount Skydance / Warner Bros. Discovery | ~$110B | Closed Oct 6, 2026 | Media scale |
| EA take-private (PIF, Silver Lake, Affinity) | $55B | Closed Aug 2026 | Sponsor take-private |
| Aligned Data Centers (AIP, MGX, BlackRock's GIP) | $40B | Closed Jul 2026 | AI infrastructure |
| Charter / Cox | $34.5B | Closed Aug 20, 2026 | Cable broadband |
| Alphabet / Wiz | $32B | Closed Mar 11, 2026 | Cybersecurity |
| Palo Alto Networks / CyberArk | ~$25B | Closed Feb 2026 | Cybersecurity |
| AT&T and SpaceX / EchoStar spectrum | $23B and $17B | AT&T closed Jul 28, 2026; SpaceX pending | Spectrum |
| Nvidia / Groq (license and hires) | ~$20B (as reported) | Signed Dec 2025 | AI chips |
| Verizon / Frontier | ~$20B | Closed Jan 20, 2026 | Fiber |
| HPE / Juniper | ~$14B | Closed Jul 2025 | Networking |
| Thoma Bravo / Dayforce | $12.3B | Closed Feb 2026 | Sponsor take-private |
| Texas Instruments / Silicon Labs | ~$7.5B cash | Pending, H1 2027 target | Semiconductors |
The three telecom entries belong to one wave: Charter/Cox created the largest US broadband provider, EchoStar sold its spectrum to AT&T and SpaceX, and Verizon bought Frontier for its fiber, all covered in telecom and cable consolidation.
How 2026 Raised the Ceiling
The largest deal of the period came in February 2026, when SpaceX acquired xAI in an all-stock combination that valued xAI at about $250 billion and SpaceX at $1 trillion, as reported by Bloomberg Government citing people familiar with the matter. Reuters, citing LSEG data, called it the largest M&A deal on record, ahead of Vodafone's $203 billion Mannesmann takeover in 2000. It folded a frontier model lab into SpaceX ahead of its record 2026 IPO.
The big 2025 announcements also closed. The EA take-private completed in August 2026 at $210 per share, backed by $20 billion of JPMorgan debt, making it the largest leveraged buyout on record and a test of sponsor leverage on a live-services gaming franchise. In media, Paramount's all-cash $31 per share offer displaced Netflix's $82.7 billion agreement for Warner Bros. Discovery's studios and streaming business in February 2026 (Paramount paid Netflix's $2.8 billion break fee), and the combination closed on October 6, 2026 as Skydance, completing the streaming consolidation that the bidding war set in motion.
In semiconductors, Texas Instruments agreed in February 2026 to buy Silicon Labs for $231 per share in cash, a sign that semiconductor M&A is consolidating around manufacturing scale as well as AI.
Sub-Sector Themes
The deal list clusters into five themes, with the Americas holding 12 of the 16 TMT megadeals in early 2026:
- AI concentration: xAI, Aligned and Groq show private capital assembling the AI infrastructure stack, from models to compute to data centers.
- Cybersecurity platforms: Wiz and CyberArk both closed in early 2026, confirming that platform consolidation in security can clear review at $25-32 billion.
- Sponsor take-privates: EA and Dayforce show sovereign and PE appetite for category leaders, though PwC reports fewer actionable public-to-private targets as AI disruption makes some software harder to finance.
- Media and telecom scale: Paramount/WBD, Charter/Cox and the EchoStar sales all buy subscribers, content or spectrum that is hard to build.
- Remedies over blocks: HPE closed Juniper after a DOJ settlement that a federal court approved in August 2026 over state objections, a pattern covered in the Big Tech regulatory environment.
Together these themes explain why deal value rose while deal volume fell: buyers pay for scarce, strategic assets rather than spreading capital across many mid-sized deals.
