How Investor Pushback Killed the CoreWeave – Core Scientific Merger – Deal Postmortem

2025 has turned out to be blockbuster year for M&A activity, not just in terms of number and size of deals announced ($899 billion worth of new deals announced through November 30, 2025) but also the relatively low number of deals that failed. Only five deals failed this year, while 184 deals completed successfully. This compares with 12 deal failures in each of the last two years.

Not only did we see lower deal failures this year, the reasons these deals failed are also very different. More than half the deals that failed in 2024 were on account of regulatory issues, while only one deal failed this year (Cross Country Healthcare) because the FTC would not approve the deal before the termination deadline.

History does not repeat itself but it often rhymes (quote is attributed to Mark Twain) and this is one of the reasons we built a Failed Mergers & Acquisitions tool several years ago to allow us to track every failed merger over the last fifteen years.

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