Goldman Sachs M&A Chief Sees Massive Capital Pools Fueling Long-Term Dealmaking

Leveraged buyouts are at all-time highs and the market for big-ticket M&A — deals worth $5 billion or $10 billion or more — is as good as it's ever been," Stephan Feldgoise, Goldman Sachs' global head of mergers and acquisitions, told Bloomberg TV on Wednesday. It was a striking declaration from the banker who oversees the firm's global deal advisory franchise, and it landed against a backdrop of genuine market turbulence.

Wall Street is awash in "massive pools of capital" that should drive M&A activity over the long-term, even as volatility upends dealmaking, Feldgoise argued. "There is an incredible amount of capital sitting with investors," he said. "Public equity, private equity, public debt, private debt. That quantum of capital is substantial, looking to invest in transactions into companies. There's lots of ways that capital can reach its destination."

The sheer volume of deployable capital has kept dealmaking elevated despite a choppy macro environment. The U.S. M&A market saw its biggest surge of mega deals in a decade in 2025, with 11 transactions announced at values upward of $30 billion, compared to seven in 2024 and four in 2023. The aggregate value of deals surpassed $2 trillion in 2025, the highest in value terms since 2021. That context gives Feldgoise's bullish tone real grounding: he said he is seeing almost double the amount of deals in the $5 billion to $10 billion range, a trend he said mirrored M&A cycles of the early 2000s and 2010s.

On the private equity side, the numbers are similarly historic. Private equity dealmakers inked $397.5 billion worth of LBOs in 2025, inching above 2007's record-setting $397.2 billion, per Dealogic data. That record was powered in part by landmark transactions: the $55 billion Electronic Arts buyout led by Silver Lake, Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, and Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners — the largest private equity buyout of all time — and Sycamore Partners' $23.7 billion leveraged buyout of Walgreens Boots Alliance demonstrated that sponsors are willing to pursue massive, complex, high-profile transactions.

Yet Feldgoise was careful not to declare clear skies. The M&A environment, he said, carries real friction. "The natural gravity of that flow is being reflected in what remains a fairly frothy M&A market, despite headwinds such as artificial intelligence upending software valuations." That tension is playing out in real time in credit markets: selling pressure for leveraged buyout loans has been high, amid fears that artificial intelligence will damage or even bankrupt the software companies that account for a fair chunk of the market.

For Goldman's deal teams, the implications of Feldgoise's framing are significant. He has previously described 2026 in terms of three defining forces: "technology, globalization, and ambition." The back half of 2025 contributed to what was an exceptional M&A year rivaling record volumes, and Feldgoise notes that AI will affect not just the global landscape economically and geopolitically, but will have a massive impact on the M&A market. It's not just AI companies or hyperscalers thinking about transactions; it's the software, data centers, semiconductors, real estate, power, and transmission sectors, too.

That breadth of opportunity is what underpins Feldgoise's long-term confidence. For analysts and associates deep in pitch prep and live-deal diligence, the message from the top of Goldman's M&A house is unambiguous: the capital is there, the appetite for scale is there, and the only variables are timing and the ability to navigate an increasingly complex valuation landscape reshaped by AI.