There were high hopes for January, but deal activity ebbed and flowed following 2025 trend lines. Deal volume dipped 15% to USD 271bn compared to a year ago, but a wealth of early-stage deal negotiations suggests rising momentum.

Healthcare and finance transactions were present in the top deals announced in January, continuing the trend from the latter part of 2025. While an AI funding round still topped the table, deals for medical device maker Penumbra and insurance underwriter Beazly garnered price tags above USD 10bn.

Source: Mergermarket; data correct as at 9-Feb-2026

AI plays pack on assets

The difference now for the AI gold rush is the need for creative structures to help support its infrastructure build out and the room for private equity to support this wave of innovation.

xAI’s USD 20bn funding round structure, for example, not only included a sale and lease back of a data centre asset to one of Musk’s inner circle of investors Valor, it also saw Apollo provide USD 3.5bn in funding for the transaction, through a triple net lease structure.

Infrastructure funds are also playing an increasingly important role in this story, evidenced by the blockbuster USD 40bn agreed takeover in October of Macquarie Asset Management’s Aligned Data Centers in the US by a consortium led by BlackRock Global Infrastructure Partners, Abu Dhabi-based MGX, and the Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Partnership.

The huge opportunities for private capital stemming from the AI infrastructure build out was a key topic this week among participants at IPEM Wealth in Cannes.

Thomas Friedberger, CEO of Tikehau Investment Management, said during the “What do fractures in the global economy mean for Europe?” panel at IPEM Wealth that economies will be more capex based rather than consumption based, and there is scope for private capital to participate in the AI infrastructure build out as governments wrestle with debt-to-GDP ratios. Canadian pension funds have already been active in this arena, he noted.

“The industry has to evolve from multiple expansion to asset-heavy portfolios,” Friedberger said.

Indeed, overall M&A activity in dollar terms for 2025 was focused around the new infrastructure stack, from AI to power and chips, with trend lines across the sectors aligning.

The race to build out the AI infrastructure has seen valuations across these industries reach eye watering multiples.

Average deal sizes across the sectors reached USD 251m for AI, USD 434m for power, USD 406m for semiconductors and USD 1,441m for data centres in 2025, according to Mergermarket data. As a result, across each of the sectors, all-share mergers and funding rounds, exit hopes of an opening of the IPO market are heating up.

Charles de la Ferriere, head of infrastructure France, M&A and transaction solutions at AON, talked at IPEM Wealth of how the convergence of digital infrastructure sector has gone from being a niche to a core part of the market. “But is this just a hype cycle?” he questioned, noting on the conference sidelines that the trend lines point to a bubble developing a slow puncture: no dramatic pop, just a gradual deflation.

The froth long associated with AI appears to be seeping into power, digital infrastructure, and storage—sectors that must work in concert to support digital sovereignty and the physical reality of AI scale‑up.

Digital, power and storage have to all be there for the infrastructure roll out and digital sovereignty, Ferriere pointed out.

But, with tech stocks swooning, AI’s impact on 2026 M&A is still hard to pin down completely.

Mega-deals or Sprawling Empires?

With three deals announced above USD 10bn, January’s pace of mega deals slowed a little from the record-making tallies in 3Q and 4Q, but those that were being negotiated in the background during the month show the appetite for risk, at least for paper deals, for the right assets, is back on.

2025’s scale story was around being rewarded for having the right scale to place a bet on the future of your industry, but these were also often keenly focused on reducing waste, avoiding unwieldy conglomerates for scale’s sake. Unless you were in tech, in which case vertical integration and big bets were in vogue.

Now, industry pressures, racing for materials, a global competition for energy and data centres, and the pursuit of scale is sparking ambitious hopes of deals that will create vertically -integrated corporate titans across critical sectors for the future.

In 2026, both xAI/Space X and Glencore/Rio Tinto were deep in discussions on potential tie ups to create mega mergers. In February, Space X and xAI lifted off together, and the mining mega merger was scrapped.

The SpaceX merger significantly complicates the equity story for its IPO, shifting from a satellite and reusable rockets business – to a space-infrastructure conglomerate that will be sending data centres into space.

Market observers have already questioned whether this structure would make sense if Elon Musk were not at the helm, so a Tesla addition to the fold is entirely possible. The question is how the Tesla story would sit within the future conglomerate structure, and would the benefits of a unified structure outweigh the benefits of having two listed entities with strong brand names to tap for capital? Tesla also already owns a small stake in xAI.

For Glencore and Rio Tinto, although the deal broke before it could be shepherded through to shareholders, the two companies had an attempt at creating a mining leviathan.

The colossal mining mega-merger broke down on valuation, and leadership sticking points. But the issues that had been sticking points for Rio previously, such as Glencore’s trading arm and coal assets, could have created an unwieldy empire with a murky backstory.

The race for copper will continue and there will be further deals to follow. Rio is bound for six months by it’s no bid statement unless conditions occur, such as another bidder emerging.

Perhaps things will evolve and there will be third-time luck for talks on creating a mining mega-corp.

Source: Mergermarket, data correct as at 9-Feb-2026

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