EU Clears $55B Saudi Takeover of Electronic Arts

The European Union has cleared the biggest leveraged buyout in history, and yet the approval that matters most to Electronic Arts (EA ) is still stuck in Washington. On July 23, 2026, the European Commission approved the roughly $55 billion acquisition of EA by a consortium led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, finding that the takeover would not distort competition in Europe. It removes one regulatory hurdle. It does not close the deal.

For EA’s players and its staff, the ruling changes little on its own. For the deal’s backers, it strips out one of the last places the transaction could have been blocked or forced into concessions, leaving a single serious obstacle before a Saudi sovereign wealth fund owns one of the West’s biggest publishers. The buyout also caps a stretch of intense dealmaking across the sector, with gaming M&A running at its busiest since 2022.

Why Brussels waved it through

The Commission’s finding was that the deal “would not raise competition concerns,” given its limited impact on the markets where the two sides operate.

That outcome was rarely in doubt, for a structural reason. Unlike Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard (ATVI ), where regulators feared a platform owner could starve rivals of hit franchises, PIF is a financial buyer rather than a platform holder. Its other gaming bets, from mobile publishers to minority stakes in rivals, do not overlap enough with EA’s business to concentrate the market. The Commission ran the deal through its standard merger review rather than the fast-track simplified route, then cleared it without conditions.

The deal, and the debt it leaves behind

EA agreed to go private on September 29, 2025, with shareholders due $210 a share in cash, a 25% premium to the stock’s undisturbed price of $168.32. The company’s own announcement called it the largest all-cash sponsor take-private in history. PIF leads the consortium alongside private equity firm Silver Lake and Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners; the Commission’s decision describes PIF as taking “sole control,” with the other two holding minority stakes.

For PIF, EA is the marquee prize in a years-long effort to make gaming a pillar of Saudi Arabia’s diversification away from oil under its Vision 2030 plan. The fund already controls mobile publisher Scopely and holds stakes in Nintendo and Take-Two; EA’s sports franchises, led by EA Sports FC and Madden NFL, add the kind of recurring, global live-service revenue that fits that strategy.

The financing is the part worth watching. The buyers are committing about $36 billion in equity, including PIF’s rollover of its existing 9.9% holding, plus $20 billion of debt arranged by JPMorgan. That pushes EA’s borrowings from around $2 billion to roughly $20 billion. A publisher that recently posted record annual net bookings will enter private ownership carrying a debt load it never took on while public, and servicing it will mean more than $1 billion a year in interest.

That math is why new ownership is likely to reshape how EA runs. Heavy leverage tends to force cost discipline, and EA has already cut jobs ahead of the close, part of an industry-wide squeeze that has pushed workers to organize and prompted the creation of a union hardship fund for laid-off developers.

What still stands in the way

The bigger test is national security, not antitrust. In the United States, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) is still reviewing whether Saudi state control of a company holding data on hundreds of millions of players poses a risk. US lawmakers have pressed regulators to scrutinize the deal on both data and foreign-influence grounds, and that review, not the European one, is what has held up the timeline. A hard block is seen as unlikely, but clearance could arrive with conditions on how player data is stored and who can reach it.

A few milestones are worth tracking from here:

• Foreign-subsidies review: The Commission is separately assessing the deal under the bloc’s rules on non-EU state backing, with a decision due July 30, 2026. It is widely expected to clear.
• US clearance: The original target to complete the deal by June 30, 2026 passed without a close. The parties extended their outside date to September 28, 2026, with a $1 billion break fee binding both sides if it collapses on regulatory grounds.
• On completion: EA delists from the Nasdaq, keeps its Redwood City headquarters, and stays under CEO Andrew Wilson.

Shareholders overwhelmingly backed the take-private in December 2025, and US antitrust review is already done. With Brussels now satisfied on competition, the question is no longer whether EA’s owners can win Europe over. It is whether Washington will let a Saudi fund take the controls.