To anyone with access to — or dependent on — a computer (read: anyone), the undisputed dealmaker of the year 2025 was artificial intelligence.
The needs of AI, whether for infrastructure, software, data, cooling, tubing for cooling, electrical parts, real estate or any other basic or specialized need, seemed to play a role, directly or indirectly, in nearly every deal reported to us this year.
One could even suppose, given the advances in AI applications for analysis and due diligence, that AI may have participated in some of the dealmaking itself.
But discerning the obvious is one thing; choosing the deals that make or defy the theme is another. So we sifted through the more than 1,200 M&A transactions that have passed across our desks over the last 12 months, panning for the ones that left an impression for one reason or another.
Size didn’t matter — unless it did. The Kimberly-Clark deal, for instance, wasn’t chosen for its size, even though it would be hard to ignore a $48 billion deal in your own backyard. It was chosen because it represented a major retail diversification for the paper products giant. We’ve also tried to avoid the inherent arrogance of rankings. If you’re ignoring numbers in dealmaking, there’s pretty much nothing left.
So, the deals described below, listed in no particular order, are the ones that have held our attention through this sprawling, oft-chaotic year of tariffs and tariff-uncertainty; of inflation fears and valuation imbalances; of cryptocurrency treasuries and Federal Reserve in-fighting; of DOGE-defunding and government shut-downs; of record capital markets and record take-private deals; of fragile trade relations, supply chain disruptions, H-2 visa suspensions, geopolitical conflagrations and, above all: a year of business-as-usual bearing the poker-face complexities of Mona Lisa’s smile.
The Constellation-Calpine merger sprawls across the year
Baltimore-headquartered Constellation began the year in January by announcing its acquisition of Houston-based Calpine Energy. It ended the year, in effect, as the nation’s largest provider of generated electricity when it settled the concerns of federal regulators by agreeing to shed eight generating plants. The deal was a megadeal by any standard — whether at $16.4 billion or the $29.1 billion that included Calpine’s $12.4 billion in debt. But the dollar size wasn’t actually the important part. Constellation is the nation’s largest nuclear provider with 15 plants and 26 reactors owned in whole or in part. Calpine is a major provider of electricity from natural gas and geothermal sources. And although the climate-benefit calculus is debatable, the utility-scale commitment to energy diversity for the benefit of data center operational continuity is not. Heretofore, Texas-based hyper-scale computing has depended on its attachment to the ERCOT grid. Those facilities dedicated to cryptocurrency mining have actually benefitted financially from shutting down during grid interruptions and selling their electric contract allotments to meet more critical utility needs. But the data storage operations in general, made critical by the growth of artificial intelligence, need continuous and contiguous power generation. As a result diversity of sourcing — particularly natural gas — has become a cornerstone of power generation development backstopped by nuclear, solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, even coal for moments of need. The Constellation-Calpine deal not only spanned the year, it symbolized the year’s most obvious and durable trend: electric generation by any means.
Caris Life Sciences goes public in $485M IPO
In June, Caris Life Sciences launched its highly anticipated IPO, pricing the offering of 23,529,412 shares at $21 per share, a $485 million issue that set the company’s market cap at $7.58 billion. But that’s not the story. The Irving-based company was founded by David Dean Halbert, who earlier founded AdvancePCS, a pharmacy benefits management company he sold to CareMark in 2004 for $7.5 billion (more than $12.8 billion in current dollars). In 2005, Halbert founded Caris Capital and — influenced by his mother’s death from cancer — began to focus Caris investments on precision medicine. In 2008, Caris acquired the Molecular Profiling Institute, a blood-based diagnostics platform, renamed it Caris Life Sciences and proceeded to create one of the largest datasets in oncology research which, at the time included, 6.5 million tests over 849,000 cases generating 38 billion molecular markers. The platform aims to create the next-generation sequencing with artificial intelligence and machine learning to measure and evaluate molecular dysfunction by capturing the DNA and RNA coding, as well as IHC protein expressions to guide individualized patient diagnoses and treatments.
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Fifth Third buys Comerica for $10.9B; Huntington buys Cadence for $7.4B in two major stock swaps
In early October, Fifth Third Bancorp acquired Dallas-based Comerica in an all-stock merger valued at $10.9 billion, extending the Cincinnati bank’s operations deep into the Southeast, Texas and California, giving it a presence in 17 of the fastest-growing markets in the U.S. Fifth Third paid a 20 percent premium for Comerica, and the combined company is the ninth-largest bank in the country with roughly $288 billion in assets. A few weeks later, Huntington Bancshares of Ohio acquired Cadence Bank, with dual headquarters in Houston and Tupelo, Miss., in a stock swap valued at about $7.4 billion. Cadence has more than 390 locations across Texas and the South. Huntington operates over 1,000 branches many of which are in some of the fastest-growth areas of the country.
Keurig Dr Pepper buys JDE Peet’s, then deconstructs
In late August, Frisco-based Keurig Dr Pepper agreed to acquire Dutch coffee giant JDE Peet’s and decided to do so by splitting into two independent, publicly traded companies. The beverage operations would stay in Frisco and be home to the company’s iconic soda and beverage brands. The new coffee entity will combine single-serve K-Cups with JDE Peet’s more than 50 brands with a new headquarters in Burlington, Mass., and an international headquarters in Amsterdam. Keurig Dr Pepper agreed to pay $18.4 billion cash representing a 33 percent premium for the coffee and tea brand that traces its origins to a grocery shop begun in or around 1753.
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Kimberly-Clark creates a consumer products monolith
During the first few days of November, Irving-based Kimberly-Clark Corp. announced plans to buy Kenvue Inc. in a cash and stock deal that values Kenvue — spun off by Johnson & Johnson in 2023 – at about $48.7 billion, bringing together some of the largest and most well-known consumer brands in the world. According to data from The Texas Lawbook‘s Corporate Deal Tracker, this deal was the biggest of the year in Texas and the fifth-largest M&A transaction involving a Texas company or led by a Lone Star State lawyer since 2018. Kimberly-Clark is home to Huggies, Kleenex, Scott, Kotex, Cottonelle and others. The company reported revenue of more than $20 billion in 2024. Kenvue is a consumer health company with its own collection of iconic brands such as Aveeno, BAND-AID, Johnson’s baby shampoo, Listerine, Neutrogena and Tylenol. Not too long before this deal was announced, the state of Texas hired plaintiffs law firm Keller Postman to pursue a deceptive trade practices lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson and Kenvue over their marketing of Tylenol.
Bitmine Immersion Technologies IPO and the Year of the DATCO
In June, perhaps to no one’s surprise, BitMine Immersion Technologies took the IPO plunge as a Data Asset Treasury company — a company whose strategic goal is to invest and accumulate significant shares in a particular crypto currency. The announcement became part of a parade of 80 IPOs and deSPAC transactions tied to DATCO strategies in 2025. BitMine Immersion, heretofore developers of an immersive cooling technology for the hyper-scaling servers used in cryptocurrency mining, moved from an OTC market to the NYSE American in an $18 million offering of 2,2250,000 shares for $8 per share. The offering was followed a month later by a private placement of $250 million in shares based on the company’s announced intent of pursuing and holding at least 5 percent of the world’s Ethereum (ETH) cryptocurrency. On July 3, the stock reached $135 per share. As of Dec. 14, the company said it holds 3.2 percent of the global supply. Shares closed on Dec. 19 at $31.36.
Fermi America’s $683M international IPO
Perhaps no transaction epitomized the sometimes-extravagant scramble for a slice of the AI-driven data center surge than the initial public offering of Fermi America — a nascent Texas-based REIT whose shares began trading in simultaneous on Nasdaq and the London Stock Exchange. Aside from the novelty of the offering itself, the company pieced together Project Matador a prepackaged business plan involving Texas Tech in the development of a grid-independent, hybrid-powered, 11-gigawatt hyperscaling data center on a 5,236-acre spread near Amarillo. Moreover, the plan touched all the potential soft spots — including combined-natural gas electricity sourced from the Permian, solar power, utility-scale battery storage, letters of intent from Siemens for front-of-the-supply-chain delivery of increasingly hard-to-come-by F-Class generation equipment and plans to name a small-scale nuclear plant after President Donald Trump. Project Matador was fashioned from the rolodex of Fermi America chair and founder Toby Neugebauer. And the fact that former Texas governor and U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry is listed as a co-founder is not expected to impede the regulatory processes involved in any of the above.
Taking Private: Blackstone buys TXNM Energy for $11.5B
The opposite of the IPO is the take-private deal and the proposed $11.5 billion acquisition of Albuquerque-based TXNM Energy in August stands as the fifth-largest public-to-private transaction of the 2025. TXNM owns a 10.2 percent stake in the Palo Verde nuclear facility. And as the largest provider of residential and commercial electricity in New Mexico and a major provider in Texas as far east as the Texas Gulf Coast, the company was bound to face regulatory scrutiny. Blackstone is a major investor in hyperscale data centers and both residential and commercial consumers have expressed fears that a privatized provider would divert power and favorable pricing to its own investments. In mid-December Blackstone and TXNM settled with the Public Utiility Commission of Texas with a series of regulatory and $45.5 million in credit concessions. Both companies are expecting federal approvals to close the transaction by mid-2026.
LNG Exports: Decisions, Un-Decisions
In one of the important “undeals” of the year, Dallas-based Energy Transfer announced mid-December that it is suspending plans to build out planned LNG export facilities in Lake Charles, La. The reason? The company said it decided to focus its capital resources on the “significant backlog of natural gas pipeline infrastructure projects that Energy Transfer believes provides superior risk/return profiles.” There’s another reason: the phenomenal flow of Final Investment Decisions for other Gulf Coast projects this year created a potential for oversupply of LNG exports at the the very moment the Lake Charles facility would be going online in the early 2030s. ET is open to offers, but other investors are going ahead. In 2025, according to S&P Global, there were six FIDs for natural gas liquefaction facilities in the U.S. involving 60 million MT per year. That amounts to 70 percent of LNG expansion across the planet. Instead, ET plans to expand the diameter of its 516-mile Desert Southwest pipeline from 42 inches to 48 inches, adding as much as 2.3 billion cubic feet per day to natural gas deliveries to the Phoenix area from its Permian Basin sources.
Texas Stock Exchange Starts its Engine
Dressed up like a Formula 1 machine with $270 million in capitalization, the nascent Texas Stock Exchange moved from garage to starting line in 2025 with the news in September that its existence had been approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Likewise, the exchange resolved its differences in December with the Toronto Stock Exchange over use of the symbol TXSE, which the Canadian exchange claimed could be confused with its own “TSX.” Apparently, Canadians aren’t particularly happy to be confused with their American cousins these days. But the differences were resolved in court-ordered mediation. Moreover, TXSE Group Inc. announced in December that an additional $20 million from investors led by Goldman Sachs and Bank of America only gilded the coffers of what was already “the most well-capitalized exchange ever approved by the SEC.” The Dallas-based exchange plans to begin trading ETFs in early 2026. The new exchange hopes to capitalize both on recent changes in Texas corporate governance standards and a robust economy to counteract a nearly 50 percent decline over three decades in publicly traded companies.
EchoStar’s $40B Solution
In June 2025, Colorado-based EchoStar — operators of DISH TV, Sling TV, HughesNet and other diverse media properties — was reportedly staring at bankruptcy. In filings with the SEC the company reported that they’d missed more than $500 million of debt-interest payments as the result of “force majeur.” The “force” was the Federal Communications Commission. In May, the FCC had notified the company that the company’s vast cache of unused satellite and 5-G wireless spectrum licenses was under review and were in danger of being rescinded. Rather than seek Chapter 11 protections, the company sought M&A protection in a September selling binge, offloading their 5G licenses to AT&T for $22.65 billion and their satellite frequencies to Elon Musk’s SpaceX for $17 billion. But the deals need regulatory approval and closing hasn’t yet taken place. AT&T provided some relief, scratching out a short-term lease of the 5G licenses in advance of closing to enhance, within a matter of weeks, its own network with 23,000 cell sites. In November, EchoStar joined up with SpaceX in a direct-to-cell satellite venture, exchanging another batch of satellite frequencies for $2.6 billion in cash and SpaceX stock. But citing tariffs, the 43-day federal government shut-down and a lack of cash in its foreseeable future, EchoStar told the SEC in November that their on-going situation “raises substantial doubt about our, and certain of our subsidiaries, ability to continue as a going concern.”
A 140-year local legacy ends with sale of DMN
The once vigorous competition between media outlets in Texas all but ended in the summer of 2025 with the sale of The Dallas Morning News to Hearst Corp. and the acquisition of TEGNA Inc. by Texas-based Nexstar Media Group. The $6.2 billion Nexstar deal rolled up TEGNA’s 65 local television stations 51 markets, including 15 stations in 12 markets in Texas. The sale of The News, which closed in September, puts the major newspapers of the state’s four largest cities under Hearst ownership. An unsolicited, competing bid for The News by Alden Global Capital pushed the final sale price to $88 million, but the real story was the end of 140 years of local ownership. Nexstar is already the nation’s largest broadcast group as owner or partner in more than 200 local stations in 116 markets. The TEGNA acquisition is expected to close in mid-2026 following federal regulatory approvals.