US trio guide Apollo's €2bn deal for data centre cooling provider

Sidley Austin, Paul Weiss and Kirkland & Ellis are advising on Apollo’s acquisition of a majority stake in Kelvion, a leader in cooling management for sectors like data centres, from fellow PE firm Triton.

The deal values the German company at around €2 billion, according to Bloomberg. Triton, which bought Kelvion in 2014 for €1.3 billion, will retain a minority stake.

AI infrastructure boom

The sale comes amid a surge in demand for infrastructure like data centres, with governments and tech giants pouring billions into capacity to power the AI boom. The Financial Times reports that Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta will together spend more than $400 billion on data centres in 2026 alone - on top of more than $350 billion this year.

Apollo continues to ramp up its investment in major infrastructure assets. Earlier this year, it was among several private capital heavyweights linked to talks to help Meta raise $29 billion for AI data centre construction across the US. In June, it agreed to provide £4.5 billion in debt financing for the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station - the largest sterling private credit deal on record.

Advising

Sidley Austin advised Apollo on the M&A side, led by London private equity partners Ramy Wahbeh and Kaisa Kuusk.

Paul Weiss advised Apollo on the financing and regulatory aspects of the transaction with a team led by London partners David Carmona (finance), Matthew R Friedman (capital markets) and Annie Herdman (competition).

Kirkland & Ellis acted for Triton. The team included Munich-based partners Ben Leyendecker, Florian Sippel, Hendrik Braun and Sebastian Häfele (corporate), as well as Michael Ehret and Tim Nobereit (tax) and Jörg Weber (debt finance).