Blackstone has agreed to acquire Flow Control Holdings (FCH), a US provider of engineered sanitary and high-purity flow components, from Audax Private Equity.
Funds managed by Blackstone Capital Partners and Blackstone Energy Transition Partners will take a majority stake in the Cincinnati-headquartered business for an undisclosed sum, with Audax retaining a minority equity position.
FCH manufactures high-performance liquid cooling components used by original equipment manufacturers and hyperscalers across coolant distribution units, in-row manifolds, and secondary fluid networks for data centres.
Bilal Khan, senior managing director, and Mark Zhu, managing director, at Blackstone, said: “We believe that FCH has enormous tailwinds for continued growth as the latest generations of high-performance AI infrastructure increasingly rely on liquid cooling technology for significantly improved energy and chip efficiency.
“FCH has built deep trust with their customers for some of the most demanding workloads across both the data centre and food, beverage, and pharmaceutical markets.”
Scott Kerns, CEO of Flow Control Holdings, said: “Over the past four years, we’ve invested significantly to develop a leading position in the data centre cooling market supporting our original equipment manufacturers customers and hyperscalers.
“Audax has been a tremendous partner supporting FCH through investments in the team, capital for new production and distribution facilities, and the execution of 10 acquisitions to build FCH’s capabilities in the data centre cooling, food, beverage and pharma markets.”
Don Bramley, Audax private equity partner, said: “We believe the sale of FCH represents a tremendous outcome for the incredibly dedicated and talented team at FCH as well as our investors.
“Scott and the entire team have been outstanding partners in building FCH as a leader in the data centre cooling market.”
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