The world’s largest oilfield-services company is spending $4.1 billion to acquire a missing piece of an increasingly ambitious business outside the oilfield.
SLB agreed Monday to acquire thermal-management manufacturer Kelvion for approximately $3.4 billion in cash and assume about $700 million of debt, giving the company a substantially larger position in the cooling systems required for increasingly power-dense AI data centers.
Reuters described SLB as the world’s largest oilfield-services company.
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The acquisition moves SLB beyond supplying prefabricated data-center infrastructure toward a more integrated offering. SLB said adding Kelvion’s cooling technology would more than double its revenue opportunity per gigawatt of delivered data-center capacity.
Kelvion itself is expected to generate approximately $2.3 billion to $2.4 billion in revenue and $350 million to $400 million in adjusted EBITDA in 2026. Data centers are expected to account for $1.2 billion to $1.3 billion of that revenue, making the sector Kelvion’s largest and fastest-growing end market.
SLB is paying approximately 11 times Kelvion’s estimated 2026 EBITDA before synergies. The company puts the multiple at roughly 8.5 times after incorporating expected annual run-rate synergies.
The oilfield firm expects about $120 million in annual EBITDA synergies within three years, coming from both cost reductions and additional revenue opportunities. It expects the acquisition to increase earnings per share and free cash flow per share during the first 12 months after closing.
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On a pro forma basis, SLB said its existing data-center business and Kelvion would generate more than $2.0 billion in combined 2026 data-center revenue and approximately $300 million in adjusted EBITDA. By 2028, SLB is targeting $4.5 billion to $5.0 billion in revenue and $700 million to $800 million in adjusted EBITDA from the combined operation.
That would make data centers a material business for a company that generated $35.71 billion of total revenue in 2025. SLB’s full-year revenue declined 2% last year, while adjusted EBITDA fell 7% to $8.46 billion.
Already, SLB said it had delivered more than 1.3 gigawatts of modular infrastructure since April 2024 and expects cumulative deliveries to exceed 2 gigawatts by the end of 2026.
Its strategy increasingly connects several parts of the AI infrastructure stack. In March, Nvidia selected SLB as the modular design partner for its DSX AI factories. SLB and Nvidia are also developing AI infrastructure and models aimed at the energy industry.
SLB followed in July with an agreement with Liberty Energy to combine modular data-center infrastructure with integrated power-generation systems. The companies said the alliance would target new data-center projects globally.
The company has also been selected by Meta Platforms to support a major data-center development in Canada, according to the company.
Kelvion fills another infrastructure requirement. Its portfolio includes heat-exchange and thermal-management systems used to remove heat from data centers as computing density and power consumption increase.
The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approval and other customary conditions.
