In January, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei fired the starting gun for a remarkable year of equity capital markets activity with his essay “The Adolescence of Technology” on AI’s enormous potential. The rest of 2026 has been firmly about financing and monetizing that same once adolescent technology.

In 9M26, global ECM volumes passed USD 1tn. The only other year where dealmakers achieved this feat was in 2021 – a haul driven by extraordinary monetary policy in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This year has been very different. Monetary policy has been tightened; rates are high and a war in the Middle East has sent energy costs soaring. But gargantuan AI investment has propelled global ECM volumes to the second highest year-to-date (YTD) total ever.

Global 9M26 ECM volumes are 52.6% higher year-on-year (YoY) at USD 1.1tn and have now surpassed the total deal volume of USD 997.6bn seen last year.

Extraordinarily, that haul has come from 1,050 fewer deals than seen in 9M21. While 2021 represented broad-based exuberance, 2026 is a year fuelled by megadeals.

The third quarter continued to exemplify the dependence of the wider market on the global AI buildout.

Total volumes in 3Q were USD 342.8bn, down slightly compared to 2Q, but well above 3Q25 despite there being around 400 fewer deals.