Global technology firm SLB said on Monday that it has acquired Kelvion, a German manufacturer of thermal management and heat exchange technologies, from private equity firm Apollo for about $3.4 billion cash and the assumption of about $700 million of debt. SLB, which rebranded itself from Schlumberger in 2022, expects the deal to strengthens its data center business.
“AI is driving the most significant infrastructure investment cycle in our lifetime,” SLB CEO Olivier Le Peuch said in a news release. “This transaction accelerates our ambition to become an industrial technology partner to the data center industry and help customers address the growing infrastructure complexity required to scale AI.”
Sidley Austin provided outside legal counsel to Apollo with an international team led by London partners Ramy Wahbeh, Kaisa Kuusk and Florian Kamp. Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton served as regulatory counsel to the PE firm.
SLB said Kelvion, which was founded more than 100 years ago in the Ruhr Valley of Western Germany, expects 2026 revenue of about $2.3 billion to $2.4 billion with data centers accounting for about half of total revenue for the year. The company also provides thermal management technology for heat pumps, renewables, carbon capture and processing.
SLB said it combines modular manufacturing, offsite construction, engineering and digital capabilities to data center infrastructure that “can reduce onsite construction complexity and accelerate time to operation by up to 40 percent.”
“Data centers are becoming more sophisticated and energy-intensive, and customers are increasingly looking for partners that can optimize how critical systems work together across the facility and help bring new capacity online faster,” said Gavin Rennick, president of SLB’s new energy and industrial business. “Thermal management is central to that challenge, and this acquisition allows us to address it directly by delivering more integrated cooling solutions, accelerating innovation, optimizing thermal efficiency, and more directly embedding thermal management into our modular infrastructure offering.”
SLB said it projects revenue of $4.5 billion to $5 billion for its combined data center business in 2028.
Guggenheim Securities served as lead financial advisor to the Apollo and Kelvion, with UBS in London also acting as a financial advisor.