Report: Artificial Intelligence
Current Trends and Figures

Our 2H 2026 Artificial Intelligence Fundraising and M&A Market Report finds record capital moving into the sector on both sides, fundraising and M&A alike, concentrated into fewer hands than at any point we have tracked. A narrow group of frontier labs absorbed most of the increase in capital raised, and two acquisitions, SpaceX's purchase of xAI and of Cursor developer Anysphere, carried almost the entire rise in disclosed deal value.

The report traces this to a split forming inside the AI label itself. A narrow set of companies are training their own frontier models and racing to fund the compute behind them. A much larger population is building products on top of someone else's model, and raising at a completely different scale. That divide already prices into the earliest funding rounds, and it widens further up the ladder, where mega-rounds increasingly fund compute buildout as much as growth.

Regionally, the pattern diverges. North America and Asia both grew largely behind a few outsized rounds and deals, while Europe widened its base of companies as well as its cheque sizes, even as its largest rounds still lean heavily on capital from outside the continent. The report also tracks a shift in how AI M&A gets done: buyers increasingly take the whole company instead of a partial stake, and fewer deals now disclose a price.

Key topics addressed in the report include:

• Why fundraising and M&A both concentrated into a small circle of winners over the past 12 months
• The split between frontier-model developers and the far larger population of companies building on top of their models
• Regional dynamics across North America, Europe and Asia, including the EU's policy response
• The shift toward full ownership and away from price disclosure in AI M&A