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Transactions of $10bn or more have hit an all-time record in 2025 after Donald Trump’s deregulatory push unleashed Wall Street’s animal spirits and a blitz of global dealmaking.

Naver’s $10.3bn all-stock acquisition of South Korea’s biggest crypto exchange Upbit on Wednesday took this year’s megadeal total to 63, topping the 2015 record, according to LSEG data on transactions since 1988.

The frenzy comes despite a sluggish start to the year after the US president’s “liberation day” tariffs sparked weeks of market volatility and deep uncertainty about interest rates and the global economic outlook.

“Companies are taking advantage of this window to pursue the larger transactions that they’ve long wanted to do and have been expected by the market,” said Ivan Farman, global co-head of mergers and acquisitions at Bank of America.

“When you see big deals being struck in your industry, you don’t want to be left out when the chess pieces move.”

Deals roared back in the second half of 2025 as CEOs pounced on once-in-a-generation transactions, including Union Pacific’s $85bn bid for Norfolk Southern, the $55bn Saudi-backed take-private of Electronic Arts, Anglo American’s $50bn merger with Teck and Kimberly-Clark $49bn takeover of Tylenol maker Kenvue.

Edward Lee, a corporate partner at Kirkland & Ellis, said CEOs and boards now had the “confidence and visibility” to chase “big strategic moves that they postponed for two years because of interest-rate uncertainty, inflation and the election”.

The greater visibility would allow deals that were previously hitting regulatory roadblocks to finally get done, Lee added.

The second half of the year deal blitz comes after Trump pulled back from a full-blown trade war with China and choked back some of his most aggressive tariffs, all while doubling down on M&A-friendly measures, including relaxing antitrust rules.

“There’s a feeling right now in the current regulatory environment that there’s a chance to do larger-scale transactions that you may not have the opportunity to do again,” said Krishna Veeraraghavan, co-head of Paul Weiss’s M&A group.

The animal spirits have spread across sectors. Bank M&A surged as deals were approved at the fastest pace in more than three decades, while Big Pharma roared back, acquiring biotech assets to restock their drug pipelines. A boom in artificial intelligence spurred a wave of tech and data centre transactions.

“We’re seeing increased activity not just in tech, driven by a tsunami of money going into AI infrastructure, but also in healthcare, industrials, financial and other sectors,” said Drago Rajkovic, global co-head of M&A at Citigroup.

“Why are there so many large deals? There has been a lot of pent-up demand, a favourable regulatory environment and healthy balance sheets,” he added.

But M&A has been stronger among larger companies than smaller ones, a sign that deal activity remains uneven.

“Small deals are often harder to get done as they’re less interesting to buyers because they don’t move the needle. Fundamentally, smaller deals have lower returns, so there’s a trend towards our clients focusing on large transactions,” said Andrew Woeber, global head of M&A at Barclays.