Wall Street’s hopes that 2025 would be a banner year were abruptly cut short after the deals market froze up in April. But as the first half of the year winds down, the mergers and acquisitions market looks not as bad as investors feared.

Bankers can thank AI for that.

Corporations and private equity firms aren’t letting up on their push to capture the artificial intelligence wave, and it’s not expected to slow down.

“Anything that’s sheltered from tariffs in a shifting and evolving sector is where you’re going to see the activity right now, and AI is somewhere with that, where there is an absolute race,” Lucinda Guthrie, head of data provider Mergermarket, told Yahoo Finance.

Between the beginning of January and June 17, the number of US-targeted mergers and acquisitions is down by roughly 18%, according to Dealogic. But the total value of all of this year’s deals is up 10% compared to the same period in 2024.

Much of that added volume is coming from AI-related deals where “the traditional tech giants all now need to do something,” Guthrie said, adding that “although not necessarily clear-cut,” these same firms have been anticipating a smoother approval process from antitrust regulators.

From Meta’s (META) $14 billion acquisition of Scale AI last week to the $8 billion purchase agreement Salesforce (CRM) struck with AI-powered data platform Informatica (INFA) in late May, some of the biggest recent deals have been AI-focused. But that was the case even before the Trump administration rolled out sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs on April 2.

In fact, seven of the 15 largest US M&A deals so far this year have been about positioning for AI, according to Dealogic data.

The two biggest came in March with Google’s (GOOG, GOOGL) all-cash acquisition of New York-based cloud security platform Wiz for $32 billion and Japanese firm SoftBank’s (9984.T) agreement to lead a $40 billion fundraiser of ChatGPT maker OpenAI.

AI deals are the saving grace in the first half of the year. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura) · ASSOCIATED PRESS

It hasn’t just been software companies either, according to a first-half deals report from PwC. Companies in industrials, utilities, and even private equity are doing AI deals.

“Whether it’s the advent of AI and the whole ecosystem behind AI, not just the technology and the language models, but the data centers, the energy, getting the energy to the data centers, all the [telecommunications] that goes around that, there’s a tremendous amount of change,” PwC US deals platform leader Kevin Desai said in a Friday press briefing.