Global deal value reached $2.4 trillion in the first five months of 2026, up 41% from a year earlier. Bain & Company, which published the figure in its 2026 M&A Midyear Report on June 29, says that puts the market on track for its second-highest year ever.
The firm calls the rebound broad-based, and it follows a strong 2025, when M&A rose 40% to $4.9 trillion, the second-highest annual total on record.
“The great M&A rebound of 2025 was no one-off blip, and the strategic logic driving it has only intensified,” said Suzanne Kumar, executive vice president of Bain’s global M&A practice. “Companies are pursuing bold deals to secure the scale and capability they need for a fast-changing world.”
What is driving the deals
Bain points to executives chasing efficiency, resilience and growth as they respond to the shift toward an AI-driven economy, slower economic growth, higher inflation and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
Strategic M&A value rose 36% year to date. Valuations held flat at a median 11.6 times enterprise value to EBITDA, and deal count edged up only 2%. Energy and natural resources, industrials, and healthcare and life sciences added the most in absolute deal value. Financial sponsors started slowly, with deal value down 9% through May. Venture capital and corporate venture deal value jumped 206%, helped by OpenAI’s latest $122 billion funding round and a 36% rise in deal count.
Megadeals set the pace. Deals above $10 billion rose 52% in number and 53% in value. More of them are being paid for with a mix of stock and cash, which reached a historic high of 35%, while the share of all-cash deal value fell to a cyclical low of 55%.
Europe
Europe emerged as a hot spot. Megadeals pushed deal value in Europe, the Middle East and Africa up 77% year over year through May 31. Orange, Bouygues and Iliad made a $24 billion offer for Altice France. UniCredit revived its approach to Germany’s Commerzbank. Finland’s Kone launched a $34.4 billion bid for Germany’s TK Elevator, a deal that would pair TK’s US business with Kone’s strength in Asia-Pacific.
The “winner’s paradox”
Bain’s warning is aimed at buyers, especially those doing megadeals. They are trying to carry out an ambitious acquisition program while also starting the AI transformation that disruption demands. Executives are asking how to run an AI overhaul alongside, or through, a huge integration of two companies, and how they could afford to skip it. Bain calls this a new “winner’s paradox.”
“It has rarely been harder to get large, complex transactions right, yet they represent the single biggest opportunity if you do,” Kumar said.
AI is affecting deals well beyond the technology sector. The proposed $119 billion merger of US utilities NextEra Energy and Dominion Energy is driven in part by the growth of energy-hungry data centers. The companies say their combined scale will help finance and build the generation needed for surging large-load demand.
Bain says winning companies need a multi-year capital plan that separates strategy from capital spending and covers both acquisition-led growth and AI-related spending on workflow redesign and workforce modernization. Waiting is not an option, the report argues. Large deals can take 36 months or more from announcement to full integration. Deals above $10 billion take roughly seven months to close and another 24 to 36 months to deliver most of their run-rate cost synergies, so Bain wants integration programs used to push the AI agenda forward.
There is a payoff. Leading integration programs are using AI to identify and confirm cost-synergy opportunities two to three times faster than traditional outside-in diligence, and with more ambitious targets. “Integration has always carried both peril and promise, but the AI overlay is raising the stakes on both sides,” Kumar said.
The report ends with six questions for dealmakers. They cover how AI changes the deal thesis, where it offers a faster path to value, how to plan today for options later, how to use the transaction to drive broader change, whether leaders are ready to support employees through the disruption, and how integration management offices should adapt. Bain says companies that work through them are more likely to land both a clean integration and an AI transformation.
