With 799 deals in just the first six months of this year, and nearly a trillion dollars in value attached to those transactions, Texas lawyers advised on everything from data centers to drill pads. At the center of it all sits the Texas Triangle of Austin, Dallas and Houston, where energy, software and finance all vying for attention.
As we reported last week, Texas stacked up megadeals in the first half of 2026. And this week’s numbers show it built an entire market around them.
The same exclusive Corporate Deal Tracker data for Jan. 1 through June 30 that revealed 108 $1 billion transactions with Texas ties also shows 799 total deals worth nearly $940 billion. And nearly half of those were reported with values undisclosed. That’s a full M&A ecosystem where megadeals sit atop a healthy middle market in terms of transactional activity and a busy lower tier.
Unsurprisingly, energy and power remain the state’s gravitational center by deal count, but software and data loudly wear the value crown. That affirms that AI infrastructure, digital platforms and data‑rich businesses share equal billing with refineries and pipelines in Texas dealmakers’ busy lives.
And the tempo is quickening so far this year, as both deal count and value climbed from 1Q to 2Q, suggesting that the Texas’ first‑half surge isn’t a one‑off fluke, but the front end of a much bigger year, even with hostilities with Iran flailing across the Strait of Hormuz.
Of the 799 deals, 427 had disclosed values, with more than a quarter of those breaking the $1 billion mark, including fourteen giant transactions valued at north of $10 billion. The rest of the landscape spreads out like U.S. Highway 287 west of Wichita Falls: 54 deals each in the $500 to $999 million and $250 to $499 million bands, 63 in the $100 to $249 million range, and a cluster of 148 transactions valued at less than $100 million. Behind those disclosed deals sits a shadow market of 372 transactions with undisclosed values, the kind that never make headlines, but the offices of Texas law firms invoice on just the same.
In terms of sectors, by sheer volume of deals anyway, energy, power and utilities dominates, with 213 transactions and more than $305 billion in value alone, making it the backbone of the 1H 2026. Oil and gas (upstream, midstream and field services) shares the stage with renewables and storage. For some Houston dealmakers, this isn’t so much a boom as a steady stream that includes a mix of divestitures, carve-outs, tie-ups and power deals that never let up.
If energy supplies the volume, software supplies the spectacle. It may only tally 92 by deal count, but it carries the largest share of value at roughly $341 billion, powered by AI platforms, digital infrastructure and data‑rich targets that barely existed when the CDT was first founded.
Most of the first half’s action lives in the crowded middle of the sector leaderboard: financial services, healthcare, manufacturing and professional services each contributing dozens of deals, most of them middle market.
The tempo ticked up between quarters, too: 383 deals in 1Q, climbing to 416 in 2Q, and the value curve rising at a more rapid pace, from about $353 billion dollars in 1Q to more than $586 billion in 2Q.
Taken together, the latest CDT M&A numbers suggest Texas is settling into a new normal where high‑end headline-grabbers and deals in the core middle‑market grind coexist. It’s too early to tell if the back half of the year even rhymes with the first, of course.
But if these first six months are any indication, Texas dealmaking is a poem well in progress. We don’t yet know how it ends, but it’s not going to be a haiku.