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 is in the business of 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, a total enterprise value of $4.1 billion.

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

EBITDA — earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization — roughly measures the cash core operations throw off. Acquisition prices are quoted against it.

Why an Oilfield Services Company Buys a Cooling Business

SLB's rationale sits in its own accounts. Of $9.0 billion in second-quarter revenue, the Data Center Solutions line grew 33% sequentially and 80% year over year.

Management had targeted an annualized run rate above $2 billion by end-2027. With Kelvion the target becomes $4.5–5 billion of revenue in 2028 and $700–800 million of adjusted EBITDA.

Chief Executive Olivier Le Peuch, in the release:

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

He was more specific on the July earnings call: "Our ambition is to become an industrial technology partner to the data center industry."

SLB puts the addressable market for physical data center infrastructure above $150 billion by the end of the decade.

The pivot is not unique; Baker Hughes sells gas turbines into the same customer base. These companies have spent decades building heavy equipment that manages pressure, flow and heat. A data center needs the same engineering family; only the customer's name changed.

Kelvion's Three Owners

Kelvion is no AI-cycle start-up. It was GEA Group's heat exchanger division, 13 companies sold to Triton for 1.3 billion euros in 2014 and later renamed. Triton held it twelve years.

Apollo's ownership lasted exactly seven months and eighteen days. That is short for an infrastructure fund, which typically underwrites five- to seven-year holds. Its release describes the investment behind Kelvion's data center focus but does not explain the sale.

The Mechanism: Same Plants, Two Prices Twelve Months Apart

Two unknowns separate the prices: Kelvion's earnings and the multiple applied to them. 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.

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 cooling company bought; beside the other two the pricing logic is visible.

The ordering is not coincidence. CoolIT makes cold plates and liquid cooling that sit on the chip, all its revenue from data centers, and Ecolab paid 29x estimated EBITDA. Of Boyd Thermal's $1.7 billion revenue, $1.5 billion is liquid cooling.

Kelvion makes heat exchangers, air coolers and heat rejection equipment: outside the building, furthest from the die. Of its revenue $1.2–1.3 billion, about 53%, is data centers; the rest energy, industrial, carbon capture and heat pumps.

The market pays a higher multiple the closer you get to the chip. Vertiv trades above 34x trailing twelve-month EBITDA on an enterprise value basis. On multiples: What Is Valuation?

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 buyer down, seller up.

Part of the explanation is SLB's own valuation: it trades at roughly 13.3x trailing twelve-month EBITDA against the 10.9x it paid. It is buying earnings cheaper than its own shares are priced. If the $120 million synergy target lands, the effective multiple falls to 8.5x.

Causation deserves care: US indices were down on Monday and Brent had risen after strikes on Iran. Still, 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 ten months of waiting, with Kelvion's German base putting a European Commission review on the table.

Second is debt. SLB carries $12.81 billion of total debt against $4.12 billion of cash, net debt $8.69 billion. Trailing twelve-month EBITDA is $7.38 billion, putting the ratio at 1.18x.

Adding the deal's $4.1 billion takes it to 1.65x, above the "1.5x or below" commitment restated in the release. SLB expects fourth-quarter revenue above $10 billion, so the denominator is meant to grow before closing. More: How to Read a Balance Sheet

Third is what Apollo's exit means. An asset sold in seven and a half months either matured far faster than underwritten or is thought near the top of its price. The way to tell is 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.

Correction (September 13, 2026): prose tightened for rhythm; figures and sources unchanged.