AI’s Power Hunger Fuels a K‑Shaped M&A Boom as Megadeals Dominate Early 2026

A record start—on fewer deals

The year’s first megamerger landed before sunrise in Houston.

On Feb. 2, Devon Energy Corp. and Coterra Energy Inc. unveiled an all-stock, roughly $58 billion merger of equals, promising to create a “premier shale operator” with more than 1.6 million barrels of oil equivalent in daily production. Within hours, bankers’ dashboards were updating again: a multibillion-dollar deal for Nordic data centers optimized for artificial intelligence workloads, a major acquisition of a U.S. clean energy developer by Google’s parent company, and an $11 billion bet by IBM on data-streaming software.

By early March, announced mergers and acquisitions worldwide had reached about $813.3 billion—a record start to the year by deal value, even as the number of transactions fell to near historic lows, according to data from financial-information provider PitchBook.

The surge marks one of the strongest openings on record for global dealmaking, driven not by a broad recovery but by a narrow tower of megadeals in energy, technology infrastructure and healthcare. Analysts and advisers say the pattern reflects a new phase of the artificial intelligence build-out, in which the scramble to power and supply AI systems is remaking corporate balance sheets from oil fields to data centers.

“Global M&A value had a record start to the year, reaching roughly $813.3 billion through Thursday,” PitchBook senior analyst Wylie Fernyhough said in a summary of the figures quoted this month. “At the same time, transaction numbers dipped to historic lows.”

Those numbers cover deals announced through the first week of March, not a completed quarter. Some earlier years may still exceed that total once full first-quarter data are available. But the pace, coming after a record year for total M&A value in 2025, has persuaded many on Wall Street that a new deal cycle has taken hold.

Where the money is going: AI-enabling sectors

A key difference from past booms is where the money is going.

Consultants at PwC describe a “resurgence of megadeals” concentrated in what they call AI-enabling sectors—semiconductors, cloud computing, data centers and energy—creating a “K-shaped” market in which a handful of fast-growing industries see rising valuations and deal sizes, while others lag.

Goldman Sachs, in its 2026 global M&A outlook, said artificial intelligence is “driving an innovation supercycle” that is pushing companies to buy rather than build critical capabilities. Corporate leaders are using acquisitions, the bank said, to “insulate against disruption while positioning for sustained expansion.”

That supercycle is increasingly visible in the physical infrastructure behind AI.

Power and compute: owning the inputs

In January, Alphabet Inc. agreed to buy Intersect Power, a U.S. clean energy developer, in a deal valued at about $4.75 billion, according to people familiar with the transaction. The company develops large-scale solar, storage and clean-power projects, including some tied directly to data center demand in Texas and the American West.

The acquisition goes beyond traditional power purchase agreements, in which technology giants contract to buy renewable energy. By bringing an energy developer in-house, Google is positioning itself to directly control part of the power supply for its data centers, including an announced plan to invest around $40 billion in new facilities in Texas through 2027.

On the other side of the Atlantic, data center operator Equinix Inc. and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board closed a roughly $4 billion joint acquisition of atNorth, a Nordic operator specializing in high-density, liquid-cooled facilities powered primarily by renewable energy. The sites are marketed as designed for AI workloads, with high power density and systems to reuse waste heat.

Software and data: buying the plumbing for AI

Inside the networks that connect those facilities, technology and software deals are also accelerating. In early March, IBM Corp. said it would acquire Confluent Inc., a California-based company that builds data-streaming platforms on top of open-source Apache Kafka, in a transaction valued at about $11 billion. The deal is aimed at strengthening IBM’s ability to move and process real-time data—a critical component of deploying AI models across financial services, manufacturing and other industries.

Separately, Meta Platforms Inc. made a $14.3 billion strategic investment in Scale AI, a privately held startup that provides data-labeling and model-tuning services used to train and refine large AI systems, according to a person briefed on the terms. The deal underscores the race among large technology companies to secure access to the human and machine resources needed to improve their models.

Some of the largest capital movements this year do not fit neatly into traditional M&A categories. In February, artificial intelligence company OpenAI closed a funding round totaling about $110 billion, one of the largest private-company financings on record. While that transaction does not involve a change of control, some market commentators have included it in tallies of “deal value” when assessing the scale of AI-related capital flows.

Oil and gas consolidation, reframed by data-center demand

The push to power AI is also reshaping the traditional energy business.

Devon Energy and Coterra Energy framed their stock-for-stock merger as a response to tightening supply and growing demand for natural gas and oil in the United States. The combined company will control roughly 750,000 net acres across multiple shale basins, including the Permian in West Texas and New Mexico. In a joint statement, the companies called the transaction a “transformative merger” that “combines two companies with proud histories and cultures of operational excellence,” and projected about $1 billion in annual pre-tax synergies by 2027.

Energy advisers say such transactions are increasingly evaluated against forecasts for electricity demand from data centers and AI clusters. In a separate sign of how rapidly that demand is growing, the U.S. Department of Energy this month announced a conditional commitment for a $26.5 billion federal loan to support grid and generation upgrades at Georgia Power Co. and Alabama Power Co., subsidiaries of Southern Co. The department cited “surging load growth from data centers and advanced manufacturing” among the drivers.

Beyond AI infrastructure: healthcare and media deals

The early-2026 boom is not confined to energy and AI infrastructure. Healthcare and life sciences companies—especially large pharmaceutical firms—are continuing a wave of acquisitions begun in 2024 and 2025 as they seek to replenish drug pipelines and expand into oncology and other high-growth therapeutic areas. Private equity sponsors remain active in consolidating healthcare services such as physician practices and post-acute care, though many of those deals are smaller than the headline-grabbing technology and energy transactions.

Media and entertainment are also in the crosshairs. Netflix Inc. has proposed an $82.7 billion acquisition of most of Warner Bros. Discovery Inc.’s studio and streaming businesses, according to corporate filings, in a deal that would radically reshape Hollywood’s competitive landscape if completed. The proposal has drawn opposition from independent producers and theater operators, who have urged state attorneys general to challenge it on antitrust grounds.

Antitrust, financing and the return of leverage

The growing scale of such transactions is reviving questions about market concentration and the balance of power between regulators and large corporations.

In recent years, U.S. and European antitrust agencies have increased scrutiny of large technology and healthcare mergers, suing to block or impose conditions on several deals. Law firms that advise on mergers say clients now routinely negotiate longer “outside dates”—the deadlines by which a transaction must close—and larger reverse termination fees to account for regulatory risk.

At the same time, changes elsewhere in the regulatory environment have made it easier to finance and execute large deals.

Investment bankers and corporate lawyers say a combination of moderating inflation, lower interest-rate expectations and narrower corporate bond spreads has improved the economics of leveraged transactions. In the United States, recent adjustments in how bank capital requirements are applied—sometimes referred to in markets as a “Basel III mulligan”—have given large lenders more flexibility to underwrite acquisition financing and hold large loan commitments temporarily on their balance sheets.

Trade and national security policy have also played a role. After several years in which the threat of sudden tariffs or export restrictions loomed over cross-border transactions, particularly in technology and industrials, dealmakers say there is greater clarity about how the U.S. government intends to use emergency economic powers and foreign investment reviews.

Those shifts have helped unlock a backlog of transactions that were negotiated or contemplated in 2024 and 2025 but delayed over financing costs or regulatory uncertainty. Advisory firms such as JPMorgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Evercore Inc. have reported deal pipelines approaching the peaks of 2021, when ultra-low interest rates and a post-pandemic recovery drove a previous M&A wave.

Who benefits—and who bears the risk

Behind the headline numbers, the shape of the current boom is raising broader questions for workers, consumers and the financial system.

The rapid expansion of data centers and grid infrastructure is creating high-paying jobs in engineering, construction and operations, but industry groups and workforce analysts warn of a shortage of tens of thousands of skilled workers in the United States alone. That tight labor market is pushing up wages in some regions while leaving others—especially sectors not tied to AI or infrastructure—struggling to attract investment.

In healthcare, research has shown that hospital and insurer consolidation can lead to higher prices and fewer choices for patients, even as larger systems argue they can spread the cost of new technologies and specialists across a wider base. With another wave of provider and biotech deals in the pipeline, policymakers are again weighing those trade-offs.

Environmental advocates, meanwhile, are divided over the AI-driven energy build-out. Some warn that new natural gas plants and pipeline expansions tied to data center demand could lock in greenhouse gas emissions for decades if not paired with aggressive decarbonization measures. Others say long-term power commitments from technology companies are making it easier to finance large-scale renewable projects and grid upgrades that might otherwise struggle to get built.

Financial regulators are watching the return of very large, often highly leveraged transactions with their own set of concerns. The combination of looser capital rules, concentrated exposures among a few global banks and private credit funds, and continued uncertainty about global growth has revived debates over whether the system is again accumulating risk in the late stages of a cycle.

For now, though, the momentum appears to be building. With several proposed megadeals still under review and central banks signaling a cautious shift toward lower interest rates, advisers expect the deal flow to remain strong through the rest of the year.

Whether that boom spreads beyond the energy, technology and healthcare sectors that dominate today’s league tables, or remains largely confined to the infrastructure of artificial intelligence, may determine how widely its benefits—and its risks—are felt.