Modine skyrockets 33% as Samsung enters talks for up to $8 billion AI data-center cooling buyout
Shares of Wisconsin thermal-management specialist Modine Manufacturing surged more than 33 percent Friday after reports that Samsung Electronics is negotiating an acquisition estimated near $7.5 billion to $8 billion to expand its U.S. AI data-center cooling footprint.
NEW YORK — Shares of Modine Manufacturing rocketed more than 33 percent at Friday’s opening bell—making the 110-year-old Wisconsin industrial supplier the single biggest gainer on Wall Street—after reports emerged that South Korean tech titan Samsung Electronics is in advanced talks to acquire the artificial intelligence data-center cooling specialist.
Citing people familiar with the negotiations, Bloomberg reported that Samsung and Racine-based Modine are discussing a buyout that could be finalized within weeks. Based on Modine’s $5.64 billion market capitalization prior to the report and typical 33 to 42 percent control premiums, analysts cited by the Seoul Economic Daily estimated a full takeover price between $7.5 billion and $8 billion—a sum that would rival or eclipse Samsung’s $8 billion purchase of Harman International in 2017 as the largest acquisition in the conglomerate’s history.
Why hyperscale liquid cooling has become AI’s hottest bottleneck
Once known primarily for industrial radiators, Modine has rapidly transformed itself into a pure-play supplier of high-capacity chillers and liquid-cooling loops needed to keep densely packed AI server racks from overheating. In October, Modine spun off its legacy automotive thermal division to focus squarely on commercial and hyperscale cloud infrastructure, and just two days ago the company inaugurated a new data-center chiller manufacturing plant in Grand Prairie, Texas.
That pivot is already generating explosive growth: Modine’s data-center division posted third-quarter revenue of $439.7 million, up 95 percent from a year earlier, with institutional giants BlackRock and Vanguard holding 7.24 percent and 5.20 percent stakes respectively.
As hyperscalers pour tens of billions into next-generation clusters—highlighted Friday morning by Cerebras’s 17 percent surge on a new Microsoft chip pact and Cisco’s $9 billion AI networking forecast alongside CoreWeave’s $9 billion customer prepayment backlog—power delivery and heat dissipation have emerged as the physical ceiling on how fast cloud giants can bring new AI campuses online.
Samsung races LG and European rivals for U.S. factory scale
Landing Modine would hand Samsung immediate U.S. manufacturing plants and deep hyperscaler customer relationships in the world’s largest data-center market after the Korean giant lost out to Germany’s Bosch in 2024 bidding for Johnson Controls’ air-conditioning assets.
Samsung bought German heating and ventilation leader FläktGroup for €1.5 billion last year and committed 240 billion won ($175 million) to build a dedicated data-center cooling assembly line in Gwangju, South Korea, escalating a head-to-head race against domestic arch-rival LG Electronics in liquid-cooling hardware.
Samsung said Friday that it could not confirm the report, and people familiar with the talks cautioned that no final decision has been reached—leaving open the possibility that negotiations could still fall apart or trigger a bidding war from rival industrial conglomerates.