"How the AI revolution has turbocharged M&A" is a long-form feature published in the Financial Times on May 22, 2026, by Gerrard McMorrow, Arash Massoudi, Oliver Barnes, Sujeet Indap, and James Fontanella-Khan. It argues that AI demand is the central driver of the 2025-2026 mergers-and-acquisitions cycle, surveying deals across power utilities, data-centre infrastructure, satellites, and asset management, the rise of talent-first acquihires, and the reorientation of private capital toward financing the AI build-out.
Summary of argument
The piece advances the thesis that AI has become, in the words of Goldman Sachs investment-banking co-head Matt McClure, "a tailwind for dealmaking, and equity markets more broadly," with "a cascading impact across more traditional industries." Its organizing claim is that scale has become the binding constraint on competition: "The internet revolution was defined by companies that could conquer the world with relatively little capital… The AI revolution is overturning that model. Winning now requires immense scale: chips, energy, fibre networks, data centres and financing measured not in billions, but trillions of dollars."
The authors connect the surge in dealmaking to the Trump administration's antitrust posture, arguing that "consolidation will be tolerated — or even encouraged — if it supports the administration's broader Maga agenda of AI dominance, domestic manufacturing and economic nationalism." Trump's May 21, 2026 postponement of the Frontier-AI executive order is folded into this framing. The feature presents the deals catalogued below as instances of a single consolidation cycle, and closes by noting that "some investors question the maths and the projected profits of the companies involved, evoking the memory of the dotcom bubble," paired with an NBC poll finding that AI is less popular than ICE.
Deals catalogued
The feature enumerates a set of headline transactions across sectors. The table below reproduces them as the source presents them.
| Deal | Sector | Value | Notes (per the source) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NextEra Energy + Dominion Energy | Utilities (power) | $420B (planned) | Described as "one of the largest mergers in history"; 240 GW utility footprint focused on data-centre and big-customer power. | |
| Constellation Energy + Calpine | Utilities | ~$27B | Nuclear-fleet operator plus rival; cited as part of a utility consolidation wave driven by data-centre power demand. | |
| BlackRock-backed AES + Allete | Utilities | $39B combined | Two BlackRock-backed power consolidations. | |
| Amazon + Globalstar | Satellite | $11.6B | "Unloved" satellite operator turned strategic. | |
| KKR sale of CoolIT Systems | Data-centre cooling | $4.75B sale; >15× return on a $270M valuation 3 years prior | Niche-to-strategic transition for liquid-cooling technology. | |
| Eaton + Boyd thermal division | Liquid cooling | $9.5B | Described as "plumbing of the AI era." | |
| General Catalyst + Amex Global Business Travel | Travel services + AI | $6.3B | A bet that AI can transform service businesses. | |
| General Catalyst + Nelson Peltz / Janus Henderson | Asset management | $8B | Same thesis. | |
| Blackstone + Google "neocloud" | Cloud compute (greenfield) | $5B initial | Greenfield-build rather than takeover strategy; uses Google's proprietary microprocessors. | |
| Meta + Scale AI (talent-first) | Acquihire | $14.3B | Installed Alexandr Wang at the helm of Meta's superintelligence division. | |
| Nvidia + Groq (cash-and-talent) | Acquihire | $20B | Cash to shareholders plus shared talent/IP; Groq retains a small cloud business. | |
| Google + Windsurf | Acquihire | $2.4B | Coding architecture plus leadership. | |
| Microsoft + Inflection AI | Acquihire | n/a (raid pattern) | Earlier acquihire benchmark. | |
| Amazon + Adept AI engineering core | Acquihire | n/a | Earlier acquihire benchmark. | |
| Nvidia + Enfabrica | Acquihire | n/a | Networking start-up. | |
| Oxford Ionics → IonQ (Maryland) | Quantum | >$1B | Also documented in [[sources/clover-new-arms-race-computing-power | Clover/FT compute sovereignty]]. |
Acquihires as a takeover workaround
The feature documents talent-first acquihires as a recurring pattern, describing them as a takeover workaround in the AI race: "Big Tech has found a takeover workaround in the AI race: licensing a start-up's intellectual property and hiring its top talent without acquiring the corporate entity." It characterizes this approach as adopted by every hyperscaler since the Biden-era antitrust posture, and assembles the Meta-Scale, Nvidia-Groq, Google-Windsurf, Microsoft-Inflection, Amazon-Adept, and Nvidia-Enfabrica deals as instances of it. Jim Ryan of Morrison Foerster is quoted observing that acquihires "can offer valuable opportunities for founders and employees" but "can also raise questions for investors."
Macro-financial framing
The piece frames the deal activity against the scale of capital the AI build-out is projected to require:
- An Apollo estimate that roughly $3T is required for AI infrastructure through 2028, with private credit and specialist funds expected to provide much of the financing.
- A record $250B flowing into private infrastructure funds in 2025, directed toward data centres, power generation, and digital networks (per S&P Global).
- Sandisk's market capitalization up more than 4,000% since its February 2024 IPO, as chip-storage was repriced as a data-centre play.
- An expectation that SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic will each IPO in the coming year at valuations of roughly $1T or more.
The feature characterizes private-capital firms — Apollo, Blackstone, KKR, and BlackRock — as having shifted from deal participants to "chief underwriters of tens of trillions of dollars for AI," describing this as a change in their structural role. Marc Rowan, the Apollo chief executive, is quoted saying "the demand for capital from this global industrial renaissance that we're going through is just off the charts," and Jas Khaira, who leads Blackstone's neocloud effort, says "winners haven't been set yet. We are building at cost. This is the biggest cycle in capital in my entire career." Nvidia's Jensen Huang, on the company's Q4 2026 earnings call, is quoted: "Trillions of dollars of infrastructure still need to be built… AI is here, AI is not going to go back." Heath Monesmith of Eaton says infrastructure for AI data centres needs "to move at the speed of chip design."
Lazard chief executive Peter Orszag is quoted describing a trend he calls "discretionary state capitalism" — governments more actively directing capital and industrial policy — and saying the US economy is "increasingly being powered by investment tied to AI." Former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, who was booed at a University of Arizona commencement for comparing AI to the computer's transformational impact, is quoted: "There is a fear in your generation that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating."
Reception and positioning
The feature is among the first multi-author Financial Times syntheses to consolidate the AI-driven M&A landscape into a single account of the deals, the dealmakers, and the macro thesis. Its Apollo $3T-by-2028 figure provides an anchor for AI-infrastructure capex projections alongside Huang's "trillions" framing. The piece is structurally bullish on the durability of the AI capex cycle, presenting bubble concerns only in its closing pages; it does not engage the bear case of the AI Bubble Debate symmetrically. It flags state-level antitrust scrutiny of acquihires as "beginning to intensify" without naming specific cases, and acknowledges community resistance to "sprawling data centres" without quantifying it.
Relationships
- supports: AI Bubble Debate, AI Infrastructure Capex, AI Environmental Impact, AI Acquihires, Nvidia & TSMC — AI Compute Infrastructure, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, OpenAI.
- related: The new arms race in computing power (the compute-sovereignty companion piece, same week, same FT); AI Data Centers; Private Credit & AI Infrastructure; Musk v. Altman (and OpenAI / Microsoft / Brockman); SpaceX; Scale AI; Groq; Blackstone; Apollo; Kkr; Blackrock; NextEra Energy; Dominion Energy; Constellation Energy; Calpine; Sandisk; Eaton; General Catalyst.
- contradicts (partially): AI Bubble Debate's bear case — the piece is structurally bullish on the durability of the AI capex cycle, presenting bubble concerns only in the closing pages.
- instance-of: Discretionary State Capitalism (Orszag term, candidate concept page).
Citation form
Cite as [[sources/ft-ai-revolution-turbocharged-ma]].