The company at the center of Monday's $4.1 billion artificial intelligence deal was founded in 1920 and makes heat exchangers. It has been sold twice since last August.
Kelvion sits in Herne, Germany, and was GEA's heat exchanger division until Triton bought it in 2014. Apollo-managed funds agreed to take a majority last August and closed in January — about seven months before agreeing to sell. On Monday SLB, the world's largest oilfield services company, agreed to buy the whole thing for $3.4 billion in cash and roughly $700 million of assumed debt.
What SLB is buying is a thermal business with two halves. Kelvion expects revenue of $2.3 billion to $2.4 billion this year and adjusted EBITDA of $350 million to $400 million, and $1.2 billion to $1.3 billion of that revenue comes from data centers. The rest is heat pumps, refrigeration, carbon capture, marine, food and drink.
The equipment is the same. What changes is the paragraph around it. Triton sold a story about industrial transformation. Apollo announced its purchase alongside a note that its funds had committed, deployed or arranged some $58 billion of climate and energy transition investments. SLB's announcement opens with its chief executive saying that "AI is driving the most significant infrastructure investment cycle in our lifetime." Three owners, three booms — one product line.
The AI label is not new, though. Apollo's own announcement last August already called data centers Kelvion's largest and fastest-growing segment, and the price SLB is paying is not a boom price: about eleven times this year's expected EBITDA before synergies, roughly eight and a half after them, with SLB saying the deal adds to earnings and free cash flow per share within twelve months of closing.
The buyer is the part worth sitting with. SLB drills wells; its business is moving fluid through pipes under heat and pressure in places nobody wants to be. A liquid-cooled data hall is a version of the same problem. SLB now says it wants a data center business doing $4.5 billion to $5 billion of revenue by 2028.
Kelvion was making heat exchangers before anyone had built a server hall. What has changed three times is the sentence at the top of the press release. Nobody had to reinvent the heat exchanger for the AI build-out. Somebody just had to own one when the money showed up.
Nobody had to reinvent the heat exchanger for the AI build-out.
