Take-Privates Are Back, and EA's $55 Billion Deal Just Proved It
US take-private deal value more than doubled to $242.9 billion in 2025. Electronic Arts' $55 billion buyout, the largest leveraged buyout in history, closed in August.
NEW YORK, September 14, 2026. Electronic Arts closed its books as a public company on August 4, 2026. The video game maker's $55 billion buyout is now the largest all-cash leveraged buyout in history. It surpasses the $32 billion TXU Energy deal that had held the record since 2007. A consortium led by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake and Affinity Partners bought the company. They paid $210 a share in cash. That was a 25% premium to EA's unaffected price the day before the deal was announced last September. The transaction ended a 35-year run on the public markets. It is the clearest marker yet of a trend that has been building since early 2025. Private equity has rediscovered the take-private.
US PE dealmakers closed 41 take-private transactions in 2025, worth a combined $242.9 billion. That's according to White & Case's M&A Explorer, which draws on Dealogic data. Deal count barely moved from the 39 take-privates closed in 2024. Deal value more than doubled from that year's $104.3 billion. The broader US buyout market followed the same pattern. Total buyout and secondary buyout value hit $722.4 billion in 2025. That's more than two-thirds higher than 2024, the second-highest annual total on record. Through February 24, 2026, four more take-privates had closed for a combined $15.5 billion. That was part of 251 total buyouts worth $107.4 billion.
PitchBook figures cited by White & Case put US PE dry powder at $1 trillion in uninvested capital. Rates helped unlock it. Three US interest rate cuts in 2025 put large listed companies back within reach of PE acquirers. So did readily available leveraged loan and private credit financing. Rising rates had priced most of those companies out for years. Sponsors put the capital to work at scale. Blackstone and TPG paid $18.3 billion for medical diagnostics company Hologic. Sycamore Partners took Walgreens private for $23.7 billion. Thoma Bravo spent $12.3 billion delisting Dayforce, its largest deal ever. Blackstone Infrastructure paid $11.8 billion for power generator TXNM Energy.
The dealmaking rationale has shifted. Betting on public-market mispricing used to drive these deals. Sponsors are targeting specific businesses now. Sycamore tracked Walgreens for more than a year before moving, according to PitchBook. Thoma Bravo built the Dayforce deal around a conviction that AI will reshape enterprise HR software. Blackstone Infrastructure's TXNM bet rests on rising electricity demand from AI data centers, not the utility's stock price.
White & Case's H1 2026 update found sponsor, infrastructure and sovereign capital still active in take-privates. That includes Hg and Mubadala, both involved in consortium structures on the market's largest deals. The path isn't frictionless. A software stock selloff in the first week of February 2026 erased nearly $1 trillion in value. It followed Anthropic's release of an AI tool seen as a threat to existing software business models. Public valuations can move fast in either direction. For sponsors with $1 trillion still to deploy, that volatility looks less like a warning sign. It looks like the next opening.