Global mergers and acquisitions have climbed to record levels, and artificial intelligence is a major reason why, according to JP Morgan.
In an interview with CNBC, JP Morgan's Rohit Chatterji said AI-related activity is helping fuel the surge in dealmaking — but he was careful to note that the boom is not an AI story alone. Chatterji said momentum is strong across technology, power and renewables, healthcare, and real estate.
That spread of sectors is the detail worth pausing on. Power and renewables sit close to the AI trade, since data centers need enormous amounts of electricity, but healthcare and real estate are their own cycles. A boom concentrated in a single hot theme tends to look fragile; one running across several unrelated industries at once usually points to broader conditions — confidence, financing, and corporate appetite for big bets — rather than a single narrative.
Mergers and acquisitions are, in plain terms, companies buying other companies or combining with them. Investment banks like JP Morgan advise on those transactions and earn fees from them, so the firm has a direct window into the pipeline of deals being negotiated. Record M&A volumes typically signal that executives believe valuations, credit markets, and the regulatory environment are favorable enough to commit large sums.
The sources here are brief — a CNBC segment and its syndicated headline — and they do not include specific deal values, totals, or the time period covered by the record. What they do establish is the direction of travel and who is describing it.
Why it matters: when dealmaking hits records, it reshapes who owns critical infrastructure like power generation and computing capacity, and it tells ordinary investors that the money behind the AI story is now buying whole companies, not just chips and software.