Schneider Electric to buy data centre cooling firm Motivair for $850 mln

Schneider Electric will pay about $850 million for a controlling stake in Motivair Corp, a specialist in liquid cooling for high-performance computing, the French firm said on Thursday, beefing up offerings for rapidly-growing data centres.

The all-cash deal, expected to close in the coming quarters, will give Schneider a stake of 75% in U.S.-based Motivair, with plans to buy the rest by 2028.

The deal strengthens Schneider’s offering of direct-to-chip liquid cooling and high-capacity thermal systems, the company said in a statement.

The boom in use of generative-AI and large language models such as Chat-GPT calls for more efficient cooling solutions in data centres, particularly liquid cooling as traditional air cooling cannot disperse the greater heat, the company added.

Motivair, based in Buffalo in New York state, makes units that pump the coolant at very high pressure close to the chips, cooling servers in an efficient way, said Peter Herweck, Schneider’s chief executive.

The data centre and networks market accounted for 21% of Schneider’s 2023 orders, or about 8 billion euros ($8.7 billion)worth of sales, Herweck added, and is seeing double digit growth this year.

In the U.S. market, data centre power use is expected to roughly triple between 2023 and 2030, requiring about 47 gigawatts of new generation capacity, Goldman Sachs estimates.

The U.S. is the largest market but demand for data centres is growing elsewhere too.

Shares in Schneider are up 31% this year, helped by its strong market position.

Herweck said Schneider was not actively looking at further deals for its data centre offering.

“(Motivair) has really comprehensively, for the moment, completed our portfolio,” he said, adding that it could still consider opportunities that arose.
“We continue to be agile and we have a strong balance sheet,” he said.

Schneider Electric ended without agreement talks this year for a potential deal with U.S. engineering software maker Bentley Systems.