Mergers, acquisitions, and strategic partnerships in AI.
Saudi Aramco acquires 49% of HUMAIN for $2.6B cash plus AI assets, as PIF retains 51% and HUMAIN targets 3 GW of AI data centers by 2030.
Character.AI filed Chapter 11 on Oct 12, selling IP to Disney for $20M as mounting legal costs and failed monetization ended the chatbot startup's run.
Amazon is in talks to acquire Decart for $7 billion, a world simulation startup Anthropic rejected at $6B, reshaping the AI compute race.
Nvidia is in early talks to acquire Reflection AI or increase its $800M stake, targeting the dominant open-weight model for GPU demand growth.
AMD acquires Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2 billion in an all-stock deal targeting spatial intelligence for robotics and physical AI systems.
AMD buys Taalas, a startup that etches model weights into silicon at 16,000 tokens per second, as inference hardware races past GPU-first design.
Databricks acquires Panther Labs, targeting the security market with AI agents that automate threat detection and SOC response end to end.
Qualcomm is in talks to buy AI chip startup Tenstorrent at up to $10 billion, a move that would reshape who controls the future of AI inference hardware.
Salesforce acquires Fin AI for $3.6 billion, betting enterprise customer service shifts from human agents to autonomous AI as CRM market faces structural disruption.
SpaceX secured a $60 billion option to acquire AI coding startup Cursor in 2026, pairing it with xAI's Colossus supercluster ahead of a record SpaceX IPO.
Vertice buys Vendr to merge $75B in spend data and 250000 negotiations, building the largest procurement AI dataset and 60 autonomous agents.
SAP will invest over $1B to acquire Prior Labs and its TabPFN tabular foundation models, betting structured data is the next enterprise AI battleground.
Nvidia acquired Kumo AI for over $400 million to bring graph-based predictive models for churn and fraud to enterprise data it could not read before.
Anthropic, Blackstone, and Hellman and Friedman put 1.5 billion dollars into an enterprise AI services firm that bought Fractional AI to deploy Claude.
Salesforce acquires Contentful, the headless CMS used by 4,800 enterprises, to give Agentforce a native content layer for AI-built experiences.
OpenAI acqui-hires Hiro Finance, an AI personal CFO that managed over $1 billion in assets, then shut the app down to absorb its team and know-how.
SoundHound AI buys LivePerson for $43 million to fuse voice agents with a messaging engine that handles one billion customer chats every month.
Asana acquired StackAI for 75 million dollars to own the agent execution layer connecting AI to enterprise ERP, CRM, and IT service systems.
OpenAI is acquiring Promptfoo, the AI red-teaming platform used by 25% of the Fortune 500, and folding it into its Frontier enterprise platform.
Legora bought Cadastral, its fourth deal of 2026, to push agentic legal AI into commercial real estate and anchor a new 200-person New York hub.
Fonoa raised $110 million and acquired PwC's Indirect Tax Edge, scaling an AI tax system across 190+ jurisdictions and a billion transactions.
Nebius acquires Eigen AI for $643M to integrate its MIT-built optimization stack into Token Factory, accelerating its managed inference platform ambitions.
Salesforce acquires Contentful, the headless CMS used by 4,800 brands, to give Agentforce a native content layer for 1:1 experiences at scale.
NextEra agreed to buy Dominion for nearly $67 billion, creating the world's largest utility to power the surging electricity demand of AI data centers.
OpenAI's acquisition of Astral, maker of uv and Ruff, embeds its Codex AI coding assistant into the Python toolchain used by millions of developers.
SpaceX struck a $60B option to acquire Cursor, preempting a $2B VC raise, to secure 40M developers' behavioral data and Colossus compute before its summer IPO.
OpenAI acquired personal finance startup Hiro Finance, its seventh deal of 2026, revealing a vertical AI land-grab strategy extending well beyond models.
Meta acquired ARI on May 1, 2026 to build licensable humanoid AI software, CTO Andrew Bosworth calls it the Android strategy for robotics.
Cohere acquires Aleph Alpha at a $20B valuation backed by Schwarz Group and two governments, forming the first transatlantic sovereign AI entity outside U.S. jurisdiction.
SAP is acquiring German startup Prior Labs for €1B+ to build tabular foundation models that outperform LLMs on structured enterprise data, while locking its APIs to NVIDIA NemoClaw.
SpaceX acquired xAI in February 2026 at a combined $1.25T valuation to build orbital AI data centers; by May 2026, 9 of 12 xAI co-founders had left as SpaceXAI took shape.
Tesla buried a $2 billion AI hardware acquisition in a single sentence in its Q1 2026 10-Q filing, never mentioning it to investors on its earnings call.
OpenAI's March 2026 acquisition of Astral, maker of uv, Ruff, and ty, gives the AI company control over the tools powering millions of Python developer workflows daily, and raises hard questions about the future of open source infrastructure.
Apple acquired Israeli AI startup Q.ai for approximately $2 billion, its second-largest acquisition ever, bringing facial micro-movement AI and whisper-detection technology in-house.
Mastercard pays $1.8B for stablecoin firm BVNK in the largest such deal in history, targeting AI agent payment rails and cross-border transfers.
Mobileye's $900 million acquisition of Israeli humanoid startup Mentee Robotics merges autonomous driving AI with bipedal robotics, targeting first customer deployments in 2026 and series production by 2028.
OpenAI's quiet April 2026 acquisitions of media startup TBPN and personal finance app Hiro reveal a company building an influence architecture, not just a model company.
Meta's quiet acquisition of Assured Robot Intelligence on May 1, 2026 reveals an Android-style platform strategy: own the intelligence layer for humanoid robots and let every manufacturer build the machines.