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Total merger value hit $543 billion, the highest total since 2021 and more than the last two years combined.

U.S. tech mergers rebounded to their highest levels since 2021 this year, driven by big bets on AI and more tie-ups under a deal-friendly presidential administration.

Total tech merger value reached $543 billion, more than the combined value of the past two years, according to data provider LSEG. Goldman Sachs and Qatalyst topped the charts for the year, both earning more than $400 million in fees.

“We’re at one of these junctures where everybody wants to be the winner, but we don’t know things will play out,” said Amr Razzak, a partner at law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. “Companies are investing very large sums of money, trying to hire people, buy companies. They’re moving fast, spending a lot and testing things, so inevitably there’s going to be some trial and error.”

CEOs are also taking advantage of the Trump administration’s more favorable view of mergers to pursue deals they might not have considered in the past, according to bankers and lawyers who work on these deals.

Several major acquisitions were easily cleared, such as Google’s $32 billion deal for cybersecurity startup Wiz. Palo Alto Networks’ $25 billion proposed acquisition of CyberArk in July received early antitrust clearance in September.

The environment has paved the way for rivals to merge. These included a $22 billion tie-up between Apple chip suppliers Skyworks and Qorvo announced in October.

Even if regulators look to block a merger, deals can be cleared if companies settle by selling parts of the business to a competitor. For example, the Department of Justice sued to block HPE’s $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks in January. HPE later agreed to sell off a small piece of its business to settle the suit and the deal closed this July.

The comeback in tech M&A has been good news for investment banks. Goldman Sachs is emerging as one of the big winners from the rebound. The bank has advised on roughly 58% of the deals by value, up from 32% in 2024.

Its work advising videogame maker Electronic Arts on its $55 billion take-private scored the most lucrative M&A transaction in the bank’s history, for a fee of $110 million, according to securities filings. (It will only receive the full fee when the deal successfully closes.) It also advised cybersecurity startup Wiz on its $32 billion sale to Google, and Informatica’s $8 billion sale to Salesforce this year.

With less than three weeks of the year remaining, that performance puts Goldman Sachs well ahead of rival Wall Street banks JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, based on the share of deals it advised on. Goldman has claimed the top spot every year since 2021.

However, one boutique shop with less than 80 bankers is almost tied with Goldman Sachs when it comes to another measure, the share of fees. Tech-focused Qatalyst Partners notched its best year in a decade on that metric, taking in 8.6% of total M&A fee revenue. Goldman took in 8.9%. The investment banks’ market share of revenue may not include total fees for deals that haven’t closed.

Qatalyst mostly focused on selling tech companies for at least $1 billion. It advised on some of the largest deals this year, such as CyberArk on its pending $25 billion sale to Palo Alto Networks and Skyworks’ merger with rival Qorvo.

A surprising name emerged among the top five banks based on the fees it received. After falling out of the ranks of the top 10 banks for the past three years, Citi is staging a comeback of sorts in the tech M&A business. It most recently advised Marvell Technology on its acquisition of Celestial AI for up to $5.5 billion.

Bankers, as always, are confident that M&A will be robust in 2026.

Nadir Shaikh, a partner at Qatalyst, said a healthy equity market could set the stage for more tech M&A deals ahead as it creates a viable option for attractive private company targets, which could opt to go public instead of selling. (Qatalyst doesn’t underwrite IPOs.) Companies that eventually go public could also grow to formidable market capitalizations and become “acquirers in their own right.”

More than 50 tech companies went public this year, raising about $16.8 billion. That was an improvement compared to the average of 29 companies a year over the past three years, but it’s still well below the 2021 peak where 127 companies raised $74.4 billion on the public market, according to Dealogic.

Shaikh is hopeful about the possibility of a $100 billion tech M&A deal.

“Now just as there are more trillion-dollar market cap companies than five years ago, I think M&A deal sizes will also expand consistent with market caps and there’s going to be a $100 billion deal that gets done somewhere.”