Blackstone Acquires Flow Control Holdings to Expand Data Center Cooling Bet

Blackstone signed a definitive agreement on Sept. 10 to buy Flow Control Holdings from Audax Private Equity, adding another piece of physical AI infrastructure to a portfolio it's been building for years. Financial terms weren't disclosed.

The deal pairs two of Blackstone's investment arms. According to a press release reviewed by Business Wire, funds affiliated with both Blackstone Capital Partners and Blackstone Energy Transition Partners are jointly acquiring FCH, a structure that reflects how the firm has started treating data center power and cooling as an energy-transition play, not purely a technology one.

FCH is headquartered in Cincinnati and sells to the market most under pressure right now. According to the Blackstone press release, the company's components go into coolant distribution units, in-row manifolds, and secondary fluid networks used by original equipment manufacturers and hyperscalers. Those are the exact choke points in any liquid-cooled rack deployment, and they're getting harder to source as GPU density climbs.

Audax won't walk away clean. As reported by Private Equity Wire, Audax will retain a minority stake and continue working with Blackstone and FCH management after the deal closes. The transaction is expected to close in Q4, per Private Equity Wire, though regulatory approval timelines could move that.

Audax built FCH through acquisitions. CEO Scott Kerns said in a statement to Industrial Valve News that over four years the company executed 10 acquisitions to build out capabilities in data center cooling, food, beverage, and pharma markets. That bolt-on history matters: it means Blackstone is buying a platform, not a single-product company, with an established integration playbook already in place.

The financing side moved quickly. Bloomberg reported Sept. 18 that Blackstone had already secured a first-lien term loan from UBS Group to support the acquisition, with terms and size undisclosed. First-lien term loan mandates being placed within days of a deal announcement typically signal that the sponsor wants deal certainty on debt before it needs it, not after.

For the banks, the advisory fee pool was spread around. William Blair, UBS, and Goldman Sachs advised Blackstone, according to Private Equity Wire, while Kirkland and Ellis served as legal counsel. Houlihan Lokey and Jefferies advised FCH, with Ropes and Gray on the legal side.

Blackstone Energy Transition Partners has committed roughly $30 billion of equity globally across energy-transition investments, per Private Equity Wire. FCH fits that mandate because liquid cooling is now directly tied to the power economics of AI data centers: liquid is more efficient than air at the rack densities that Nvidia's current and next-generation chips require, which makes cooling a capacity constraint with pricing power.

PwC's mid-year M&A outlook, published in July, flagged that dealmaking remains strongest for assets that enable the AI economy, specifically citing compute capacity, energy supply, and cooling as categories drawing continued investor attention. FCH checks the cooling box and then some.

What Blackstone is paying relative to FCH's EBITDA won't be known until, and unless, the company files for public markets or the terms leak. Until then, investors watching Blackstone's own stock will have to take the firm's word that the price made sense.

Sources cited:
- Blackstone Press Release via Business Wire / Yahoo Finance (https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/blackstone-acquire-flow-control-holdings-140000167.html)
- Private Equity Wire (https://www.privateequitywire.co.uk/blackstone-to-acquire-flow-control-holdings-from-audax/)
- Bloomberg (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-18/blackstone-lands-loan-for-data-center-cooling-firm-acquisition)
- Industrial Valve News (https://www.industrialvalvenews.com/featured/blackstone-to-acquire-flow-control-holdings-a-leader-in-highly-engineered-data-center-liquid-cooling-components/)
- Kirkland & 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)
- PwC Global M&A Industry Trends: 2026 Mid-Year Outlook (https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/services/deals/trends.html)