Blackstone Acquires Data Center Cooling Supplier Flow Control Holdings

Blackstone (NYSE: BX) announced September 10 that funds affiliated with Blackstone Capital Partners and Blackstone Energy Transition Partners had signed a definitive agreement to buy Flow Control Holdings from Audax Private Equity, adding another physical-infrastructure play to a portfolio the firm has been building around AI power demand.

The target is not a software company. According to a press release reviewed by Business Wire, FCH is a Cincinnati, Ohio-based manufacturer whose components sit inside the liquid cooling loops of large data centers: coolant distribution units, in-row manifolds, and secondary fluid networks used by OEMs and hyperscalers. That's the unglamorous plumbing that keeps GPU clusters from throttling, and it's increasingly a bottleneck as operators push rack densities higher.

Audax will keep a minority equity stake under the deal and continue working alongside Blackstone and FCH management, per the announcement. Terms were not disclosed. Kirkland and Ellis acted as legal counsel to Blackstone; William Blair, UBS, and Goldman Sachs advised the buyer on the financial side, according to Private Equity Wire. Houlihan Lokey and Jefferies advised FCH, with Ropes and Gray as its legal counsel.

Separately, Bloomberg reported September 18 that UBS has been mandated to provide a first-lien term loan to support Blackstone's acquisition of a controlling stake in FCH, citing a person familiar with the matter. Loan size was not disclosed.

FCH CEO Scott Kerns said in the announcement that the company has executed 10 acquisitions over the past four years to build out its position in data center cooling alongside food, beverage, and pharmaceutical markets. That buy-and-build history was assembled under Audax, which had roughly $20 billion in assets under management as of July 2026.

Blackstone's stated rationale follows a pattern the firm has repeated across its infrastructure and energy transition books. Senior Managing Director Bilal Khan and Managing Director Mark Zhu said in the announcement that they see FCH as having "enormous tailwinds" as AI infrastructure increasingly relies on liquid cooling for energy and chip efficiency. Blackstone Energy Transition Partners alone has committed roughly $30 billion of equity globally across the energy transition sector, per Private Equity Wire.

The market framing is real enough. An SEC filing by Trinity Biotech cited projections showing the data center liquid cooling market growing from $4 billion in 2026 to $27 billion by 2033. That's a third-party projection, not Blackstone's own number, and the firm didn't quote it. But it explains why a controls and fluid components supplier serving hyperscalers commands PE interest at this point in the cycle.

ESG News noted that liquid cooling is significantly more energy efficient than air cooling, allowing data centers to improve power usage effectiveness and support higher-density computing. That efficiency argument matters to hyperscalers managing electricity costs at scale, and it gives FCH's customer base a practical reason to keep spending on the infrastructure rather than deferring it.

The deal is expected to close in Q4, per Private Equity Wire. No regulatory hurdles were flagged in the announcement, which is consistent with FCH's position as a mid-market industrial supplier rather than a dominant platform in a concentrated market. Blackstone did not provide revenue figures for FCH, and the private company does not publicly report financials.

Sources cited:
- Blackstone Press Release via Business Wire / Yahoo Finance (https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/blackstone-acquire-flow-control-holdings-140000167.html)
- Blackstone.com Press Release (https://www.blackstone.com/news/press/blackstone-to-acquire-flow-control-holdings-a-leader-in-highly-engineered-data-center-liquid-cooling-components/)
- Bloomberg (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-18/blackstone-lands-loan-for-data-center-cooling-firm-acquisition)
- Private Equity Wire (https://www.privateequitywire.co.uk/blackstone-to-acquire-flow-control-holdings-from-audax/)
- ESG News (https://esgnews.com/blackstone-to-acquire-data-center-cooling-leader-fch/)
- SEC Filing, Trinity Biotech Form 424B3 (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0000888721/000155485526001392/MainDocument.htm)
- Kirkland and Ellis Press Release (https://www.kirkland.com/news/press-release/2026/09/kirkland-advises-blackstone-on-agreement-to-acquire-fch-a-leader-in-highly-engineered-dclcc)