Tech companies have a lot of money. Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft have eclipsed a trillion-dollar market cap. And one thing tech giants love to do with their money is scoop up other companies in massive merger and acquisition (M&A) deals.
Every year, billions upon billions of dollars change hands in service of corporate consolidation. New blockbuster tech deals reshape the landscape so often that we decided to keep track of the most lucrative ones. The list starts with deals of only a couple billion and works its way up to the biggest tech mergers and acquisitions we’ve seen to date.
You won’t find futile efforts like Broadcom’s blocked $121 billion deal to buy Qualcomm, Qualcomm’s failed $47 billion bid for NXP Semiconductors, or Nvidia’s seemingly doomed bid for Arm. Those struggles exemplify one very important rule: the deal isn’t closed until it clears government and regulatory approval. If a deal has been announced but hasn’t yet closed, you’ll see an asterisk next to its entry on the list.
We’re also not including stock buybacks, public companies going private via buyout, or—for the most part—the massive consolidation in the telecommunications and media spaces, because we have to draw the line somewhere. We’ll update this list as new tech mergers and acquisitions emerge. Thanks to capitalism and the tech industry’s outsize influence on the economy, you can be sure that eventually, there will always be a bigger deal.
