Silver Lake and Saudi PIF in Talks to Acquire Unity, Reuters Reports

Silver Lake and Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund are in talks to acquire Unity Software, according to a Reuters report, in what would rank among the largest leveraged buyouts in history. The talks come shortly after the same pairing took Electronic Arts private in a leveraged buyout of its own.

Reuters reports that a consortium of investors is involved, with Silver Lake — described in the report as owned by Jared Kushner, son-in-law of US President Donald Trump — and the PIF as the largest players. Silver Lake already holds an eight percent stake in Unity. According to the report, it was the PIF that approached both Unity and the investment firm with an offer for a full buyout.

The structure would matter as much as the price. Reuters' sources say the deal would take the form of a leveraged buyout, meaning the purchase would be funded with debt that Unity's operating profit would need to repay. It wouldn't reach the record figures of the EA acquisition, but it would still sit near the top of the all-time LBO chart.

Why does Unity's engine make this a bigger bet?

By Unity's own accounting, its engine powers more than half of all mobile games and a large share of console and PC titles. Scopely — already owned by the PIF, Silver Lake and others — uses it to run Pokémon Go and Monopoly Go. Whatever happens to Unity's ownership propagates through thousands of studios' production pipelines.

The company has also been repositioning around AI. It recently launched Unity Spark, a prompt-based tool built with Google that generates games entirely from user prompts.

What's the history of developer friction?

Unity's client-facing business has already staged one successful revolt. In 2024 the company unveiled its Runtime Fees policy, a per-install tariff on developers. The backlash was monumental, and Unity walked the policy back entirely.

That episode carried career consequences. John Riccitiello — then Unity CEO and a former Electronic Arts chief executive — resigned amid declining stock prices. His successor, current CEO Matthew Bromberg, is also an EA veteran who served as General Manager of BioWare, a studio EA recently shut down as it services the debt from the Silver Lake-PIF buyout. The pattern is hard to miss.

What changes for studios if the deal closes?

Unity, unlike EA, deals directly with individual developers at massive scale. The developer revolt that unseated Riccitiello demonstrates that Unity's core business can push back hard when ownership decisions touch their margins. New, controversial owners taking the company private — with debt to service — could trigger exactly the kind of upheaval that puts operating profit at risk.

For studios building on Unity, the open questions are operational: pricing stability under debt pressure, the fate of the AI-pivot strategy under private ownership, and whether a leveraged balance sheet revives instincts like the ones behind Runtime Fees.

Nothing is signed. The talks could still collapse, as buyout talks do. Watch for Unity's next disclosure — or silence — on the approach, and for any developer reaction loud enough to repeat 2024.