The video game publisher Electronic Arts announced on Monday that it agreed to be taken private in a deal valued at roughly $55 billion by a group of investors that includes a firm managed by President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.
The deal would pay stockholders $210 per share in cash, a 25 percent premium to the company’s share price before news of the deal leaked.
If completed, it would be the largest buyout of a publicly traded company to date, not adjusting for inflation. The investors would partly finance the deal with a $20 billion loan from JPMorgan Chase.
The deal is led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which already owns about 10 percent of Electronic Arts, the private equity firm Silver Lake and Mr. Kushner’s Affinity Partners.
The move is the latest effort by the Saudi fund to advance into gaming as it looks to diversify its investments away from oil. In 2021, the fund created the Savvy Games Group to spearhead a planned $38 billion investment in the industry. Riyadh hosted the Esports World Cup this summer, a video game tournament with $70 million in prize money.
The fund’s push into gaming is part of a broader bet by the kingdom on sports, which includes backing LIV Golf, a rival to the PGA Tour, a stake in the Professional Fighters League and major investments in soccer at home and abroad. For its part, Electronic Arts is a sports-gaming juggernaut, with popular franchises like FIFA for soccer and Madden for football.
The Saudi fund was “uniquely positioned in the global gaming and e-sports sectors, building and supporting ecosystems that connect fans, developers and I.P. creators,” Turqi Alnowaiser, deputy governor and head of international investments at the Public Investment Fund, said in a statement.
“I am more energized than ever about the future we are building,” said Andrew Wilson, the chief executive of Electronic Arts.
The buyout would need the approval of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a panel of government agencies that reviews international deals for security concerns. Some lawmakers have previously called for scrutiny of the Saudi fund’s investments in sports for national security reasons.
“People don’t often think about video games and national security together, but these are platforms that reach millions of Americans and often collect a lot of personal data,” said Aaron Bartnick, a former official in the Biden administration who worked on national security reviews of foreign investments who is now a fellow at Columbia University. He suggested that the committee would “want to take a close look even if they ultimately end up signing off.”
The Trump administration has warm relations with the Saudi government, and the Saudi sovereign fund has one of the larger stakes in Mr. Kushner’s investment firm. Mr. Kushner worked closely with the kingdom while serving in government during Mr. Trump’s first term.
Electronic Arts would be required to pay a $1 billion termination fee to its new investors if the company’s board decided against going ahead with the buyout, or if shareholders failed to approve the deal. The investors would pay a $1 billion fee to the company if, among other things, they were unable to secure regulatory approval to close the deal.
Electronic Arts would also have to pay a termination fee if it spurned the buyout agreement for a better offer. But whether other suitors would emerge remains unclear. Analysts had previously thought that a major media player, like Disney, could try to buy the gaming company. That deal would likely face regulatory scrutiny.
The video game industry saw a surge in sales and popularity during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns. The games sold by Electronic Arts, however, are expensive to make. And gamers are moving away from traditional video games to ones that can be played on mobile devices.
The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2026. The company would remain based in Redwood City, Calif., and continue to be led by Mr. Wilson.
The previous record for a buyout of a public company was the $32 billion acquisition (excluding debt) of the Texas utility company TXU by a group of private equity firms on the eve of the financial crisis in 2007.
A correction was made on Sept. 29, 2025: An earlier version of this article misstated the expected closing date for the buyout of Electronic Arts. It is the second quarter of 2026, not the first quarter of 2027.
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