Commitments from US corporates and investors to deploy more than £150 billion into the UK offers a welcome boost to a British M&A market that has stuttered in 2025.

Ahead of US President Donald Trump’s state visit to the UK in September technology giants Microsoft, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI and Salesforce announced a series of multi-billion dollar investments into UK AI capacity, with capital to flow into a variety of projects, ranging from the construction of the UK’s largest supercomputer and to a portfolio of data centre projects. Blackstone, meanwhile, pledged to invest £90 billion in UK projects during the next decade.

This inbound investment, which is on an almost unprecedented scale, will help to reinvigorate UK M&A activity, which has seen deal volumes fall 16% year-on-year in H1 2025, and deal value drop 51% over the same period, according to Experian.

The surge in AI and related tech-infrastructure capital that is set to flow into the UK could help to get M&A moving.

Riding the AI boom

The investment will add further momentum behind a sector that has been one of the few bright spots for UK dealmakers during the last six to twelve months.

London has established its position as the biggest data centre hub in the EMEA market, which grew by more than a fifth in H1 2025, according to Cushman & Wakefield, providing a firm foundation for further investment and M&A activity.

The UK had already corralled huge sums of private capital to invest in data centres prior to the recent US state visit. In 2024 Blackstone announced a £10 billion investment in a data centre development in Blyth in North East England and at the beginning of 2025 tech groups Vantage Data Centres, Nscale and Kyndryl committed £14 billion to build data centres in the UK.

The recent announcements from US players will supercharge this segment of the market and buoy already robust M&A activity in data centres.

Investment in digital infrastructure will lay fertile ground for M&A in scenarios where AI intersects with other sectors. KPMG, for example, notes the significant sums of capital that have been allocated to AI-powered defencetech start-ups, while healthcare technology companies, like Cambridge-based CMR Surgical, a developer of AI-powered surgical robots, and Cera, which develops AI tools to provide in-home healthcare, have also attracted strong investor backing.

Other deals, driven by the transformational power of AI across all sectors, are set to progress as the underlying digital infrastructure required to power these assets expands.

Looking beyond technology

The ramp up in AI infrastructure will also cast ripples into other markets that are not directly linked to technology – most notably power and electricity generation.

Data centres are energy consumptive, requiring large amounts of electricity to sustain the computing power AI requires to function.

Renewables and energy transactions accounted for more than half of UK transaction volume in H1 2025, with professional services firm RSM citing increased adoption of AI and rising data centre capacity has the main drivers of the deal activity in these sectors.

There will almost certainly be more M&A in the power generation space to come. In Europe data centre power demand in 2030 is expected to be more than triple the levels required in 2024, according to McKinsey, with data centres potentially accounting for between 15% and 25% of all new net European demand added up until 2030. Dealmakers will be ready to invest behind this growth trend and acquire companies and assets that will deliver this capacity.

M&A practitioners will be looking for the large sums of investment in AI from the US to not only boost UK technology-related dealmaking, but transaction activity in other sectors too.