Summary
- SLB will pay about $3.4bn in cash and assume around $700m of Kelvion debt.
- Kelvion expects $1.2bn–$1.3bn of its 2026 revenue to come from data centres.
- SLB is targeting $4.5bn–$5bn of combined data-centre solutions revenue in 2028.
SLB has agreed to acquire German thermal-management group Kelvion in a transaction worth about $4.1bn including assumed debt, pushing the energy-technology company substantially further into data centre cooling.
SLB will pay approximately $3.4bn in cash and assume around $700m of debt. The seller is a group of Apollo-managed funds, which hold the majority interest, and funds advised by Triton. Completion is expected in the first half of 2027, subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals.
Kelvion is expected to generate revenue of between $2.3bn and $2.4bn in 2026, with adjusted EBITDA of approximately $350m–$400m. Data centres are already its largest and fastest-growing end market and are forecast to account for $1.2bn–$1.3bn of revenue this year.
The acquisition therefore adds a sizeable operating cooling business rather than an early-stage technology position. Kelvion develops heat exchangers and thermal-management systems across data centres, energy, and industrial markets, with manufacturing and customer relationships in Europe and the US.
Cooling becomes part of the platform
SLB has been building a data centre infrastructure operation alongside its established energy businesses, combining modular manufacturing, offsite construction, engineering, and system integration. It expects cumulative capacity delivered through that business to exceed 2GW by the end of 2026.
Kelvion moves thermal management deeper into that offer. Higher-density AI systems are placing more heat into smaller footprints, increasing the importance of heat transfer, liquid circuits, heat rejection, controls, and the interaction between cooling equipment and the rest of the mechanical and electrical plant.
The commercial consequence is that cooling manufacturers are becoming strategic infrastructure assets rather than peripheral equipment suppliers. Ecolab’s $4.75bn acquisition of CoolIT Systems and Vertiv’s purchase of ThermoKey have already shown capital moving towards companies that own critical parts of the thermal chain.
SLB says the Kelvion transaction will more than double its revenue opportunity per gigawatt of delivered data centre capacity. It plans to combine cooling equipment with modular infrastructure and engineering, reducing the number of interfaces that customers have to manage between separate facility systems.
That integration can be commercially attractive, but it raises the execution bar. Cooling design for high-density compute is tightly coupled to server specifications, water temperatures, redundancy requirements, controls, commissioning, and the available heat-rejection route. An integrated supplier still has to demonstrate that standardisation does not become a constraint when individual campuses demand different plant configurations.
SLB sets a $5bn revenue target
On a pro-forma basis, SLB and Kelvion are expected to generate more than $2bn of data centre revenue and about $300m of adjusted EBITDA in 2026. SLB is targeting between $4.5bn and $5bn of revenue and $700m–$800m of adjusted EBITDA from the combined data centre solutions business in 2028.
The company expects approximately $120m of annual EBITDA synergies within three years, split between cost efficiencies and additional revenue opportunities. It has identified geographic expansion, integration of Kelvion products into modular infrastructure, and sales into existing SLB customers as potential sources of growth.
The deal values Kelvion at roughly 11 times estimated 2026 EBITDA before synergies, according to SLB, falling to about 8.5 times when the expected annual run-rate synergies are included.
The acquisition also broadens the competitive field around data centre plant. Large electrical, mechanical, cooling, and industrial groups are increasingly trying to own a greater portion of the physical stack as hyperscale and AI projects seek faster deployment and fewer integration points.
Kelvion will join SLB’s New Energy and Industrial group if the transaction closes. The immediate milestones are regulatory approval and completion; the longer test will be whether SLB can turn a large cooling acquisition into the integrated, faster-to-deploy infrastructure platform it is promising.
