[NEW YORK] CEOs, investors, analysts and even some bankers gathering for one of the tech industry’s biggest summits this week in San Francisco will likely spend time whispering about how 2025 could go down as the best year ever for deals in their sector.
Such chatter would have been nearly unthinkable just six months ago, when US President Donald Trump used a speech in the White House Rose Garden to announce a tariff plan that fanned recession fears and sent markets sideways.
Goldman Sachs’ Communacopia & Technology Conference 2025, which kicks off on Monday (Sep 8) at the city’s Palace Hotel, is a gathering place for companies to lay out their priorities and set the stage for potential future deals. It has also been a regular stomping ground over the years for management teams looking to win over sceptics of already announced M&A.
Among the 260 or so firms set to present this year are: Meta Platforms, hot on the heels of its US$14.3 billion investment in Scale AI; Salesforce, which in May struck its biggest deal since 2020 with Informatica; and Nvidia, the chips behemoth that just last week announced a multimillion-dollar deal for startup Solver.
At US$645 billion year-to-date, transactions such as those have helped to propel the value of technology deals to levels not seen since 2021, when pent-up post-pandemic demand resulted in a US$986 billion haul for the full year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Including communications and media transactions, the combined value of deals in the broader sector this year stands at US$822 billion, the data show.
Other transactions in the sector that have buoyed expectations this year include Palo Alto Networks’ US$25 billion acquisition of CyberArk Software, Thoma Bravo’s take-private of Dayforce for US$12.3 billion and CommScope Holding’s US$10.5 billion sale of a unit to Amphenol.
If there’s one catalyst for looming big-ticket M&A, it’s the artificial intelligence (AI) arms race. While companies such as Meta and Elon Musk’s xAI are spending big when it comes to data centres, some of the world’s biggest software companies will likely be urged to use M&A as defensive cover against the disruption to business models and revenue streams from AI, dealmakers say.
“There will be transactions that defy our imagination within the broader AI spectrum,” Barclays’ top M&A banker, Andrew Woeber, said in an interview last week. “Don’t be surprised to see a US$100 billion plus deal within the next year. Big platforms are going to make big bets.”
Wider than just technology deals, Goldman has itself been telling clients that 2026 could be a record year for global M&A generally, predicting deal flows will rise as high as US$3.9 trillion to surpass the US$3.6 trillion generated in 2021. BLOOMBERG
