Oilfield Giant SLB Buys Data Center Cooling Maker Kelvion for $4.1B

Houston-based SLB announced an acquisition on Monday. The company was called Schlumberger until 2022 and its business was servicing oil and gas wells. What it bought is a German heat-exchanger manufacturer with more than a century of history: Kelvion. The price is $3.4 billion in cash plus roughly $700 million of assumed debt. Total enterprise value: $4.1 billion.

The company had already changed hands recently. Funds managed by Apollo Global Management took majority control of Kelvion on January 13, 2026; that deal was announced on August 14, 2025 at a 2 billion euro enterprise value. Seven and a half months have passed. The same company is now being sold for $4.1 billion.

EBITDA is earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization — a rough measure of the cash a company's core operations throw off, and the figure acquisition prices are usually quoted against.

Why an Oilfield Services Company Buys a Cooling Business

SLB's rationale sits in its own accounts. The company reported $9.0 billion of second-quarter revenue, and inside that number is a line called Data Center Solutions. It grew 33% sequentially and 80% year over year. Management had said it was targeting an annualized run rate above $2 billion by the end of 2027. With Kelvion, the target moves up: $4.5–5 billion of revenue in 2028 with $700–800 million of adjusted EBITDA.

Chief Executive Olivier Le Peuch put it plainly in the release:

"AI is driving the most significant infrastructure investment cycle in our lifetime."

He had been more specific on the July earnings call: "Our ambition is to become an industrial technology partner to the data center industry." SLB estimates the addressable market for physical data center infrastructure could exceed $150 billion by the end of the decade.

The pivot is not unique to this deal. Baker Hughes sells gas turbines into the same customer base. The common thread: these companies have spent decades building heavy equipment that manages pressure, flow and heat in the field. What a data center needs comes out of the same engineering family. Only the customer's name changed.

Kelvion's Three Owners

Kelvion is not a start-up built for the AI cycle. It was GEA Group's heat exchanger division — 13 companies sold to Triton for 1.3 billion euros in 2014, later renamed Kelvion. Triton held it for twelve years.

Apollo's ownership lasted exactly seven months and eighteen days. That is short for an infrastructure fund; such vehicles typically underwrite five- to seven-year holds. Apollo's release describes the team and investment it put behind Kelvion's data center focus. It does not explain the sale.

The Mechanism: Same Plants, Two Prices Twelve Months Apart

One calculation is enough to see what separates the two prices. There are two unknowns — Kelvion's earnings and the multiple applied to them — and the arithmetic bounds both.

Kelvion's bookings are up 43% year over year, so the business genuinely is growing. But bookings are not earnings, and 43% does not cover both bounds. The remainder is the multiple's work.

The chart shows SLB's last six months. Deepwater final investment decisions rose over that period and the data center line grew; tying the share price to a single cause would be wrong. For a more basic starting point on how companies get priced, see What Is Market Capitalization?.

Where You Sit in the Cooling Stack Sets the Price

Kelvion is the third large data center cooling company to be bought. Placed beside the other two, the pricing logic becomes visible.

The ordering is not coincidence. CoolIT makes cold plates and liquid cooling that sit on top of the chip; all of its revenue comes from data centers, and Ecolab paid 29x estimated EBITDA for it. Of Boyd Thermal's $1.7 billion in revenue, $1.5 billion is liquid cooling. Kelvion makes heat exchangers, air coolers and heat rejection equipment — outside the building, the link furthest from the die — and $1.2–1.3 billion of its revenue, about 53%, comes from data centers. The rest serves energy, industrial, carbon capture and heat pump customers.

The market pays a higher multiple the closer you get to the chip. The same logic shows up in listed names: Vertiv trades above 34x its trailing twelve-month EBITDA on an enterprise value basis. On what multiples mean and what moves them, What Is Valuation? is a starting point.

What the Market Did

SLB shares rose 5.01% on Monday to $60.22, a twelve-month high. Acquisitions where the buyer's stock rises are the minority; the usual pattern is the buyer down, the seller up.

Part of the explanation sits in SLB's own valuation. The company trades at roughly 13.3x trailing twelve-month EBITDA on an enterprise value basis. What it paid for Kelvion is 10.9x. SLB is buying earnings at a cheaper multiple than the one attached to its own shares. If the $120 million annual synergy target lands, the company's arithmetic brings the effective multiple down to 8.5x.

Causation deserves care here. US indices were down on Monday and Brent had risen after strikes on Iran; SLB's day cannot be explained by Kelvion alone. What the direction does show is that the market did not punish the deal.

What Is Left Open

Closing is expected in the first half of 2027, after regulatory approvals. That is more than ten months of waiting, and Kelvion's German base puts a European Commission review on the table.

The second thing to watch is debt. SLB's latest balance sheet carries $12.81 billion of total debt against $4.12 billion of cash, for net debt of $8.69 billion. Trailing twelve-month EBITDA is $7.38 billion. That puts net debt to EBITDA at 1.18x. Adding the deal's $4.1 billion total burden to the same EBITDA base takes the ratio to 1.65x — above the "1.5x or below" commitment the company restated in its release. SLB expects fourth-quarter revenue to exceed $10 billion, so the denominator is meant to grow before closing. On reading balance sheet lines, see How to Read a Balance Sheet.

Third is what Apollo's exit means. An asset an infrastructure fund sells in seven and a half months either matured far faster than underwritten, or is thought to be near the top of its price. The way to tell the two apart is to watch the multiples on the next cooling deals.

This piece draws on press releases from SLB, Apollo Global Management and Triton Partners, on the Ecolab and Eaton acquisition announcements, on prior transaction coverage from Private Equity Wire and Cooling Post, and on public financial data providers for SLB's statistics. Kelvion's 2025 earnings were never disclosed publicly, so the calculation in the mechanism section is built on two bounding scenarios; intermediate values are estimates. Price and multiple data are as of the August 31, 2026 close.