AirJoule buys a cooling channel for $67m

Data Center Dynamics reported Sept. 16 that AirJoule Technologies has acquired BitSink, a South Carolina manufacturer of air and liquid cooling systems and electrical switchgear, in a deal valued at up to $67 million: $18 million in cash, $9 million in AirJoule stock, and up to $40 million more in shares over three years if the acquired company clears revenue milestones. The structure of that price, mostly the buyer's paper and contingent on revenue rather than deployed megawatts, is the acquisition's real subject, and it says AirJoule is buying a distribution channel more than a cooling equipment maker.

What $27 million of committed consideration buys is a position at the point in the mechanical plant where two of the buildout's constraints now meet. BitSink's equipment handles heat rejection from 60kW to 2MW, the density band its original customers work in, and the company says its gear chills 220MW of compute across data centers worldwide. It made its name supplying Bitcoin miners and, like many cryptomining firms, is now repointing at AI and HPC.

AirJoule's side of the combination is the more unusual one, since the Montana company runs a proprietary sorbent, built on a metal-organic framework, that extracts water from data center waste heat so the water can be reused. It operates as a joint venture between GE Vernova and Montana Technologies and raised $15 million in April 2025 to develop the system. Water recovery and heat rejection arrive at the same place in a data hall's cooling loop, which is the strategic case for the acquisition: it puts AirJoule inside the loop where heat leaves the building rather than selling a sorbent into it from outside.

GE Vernova, AirJoule's joint-venture parent, has been moving its own equipment up the voltage chain, a medium-voltage UPS play covered in August, and has logged three GE Vernova deal announcements since Aug. 21. AirJoule is attempting the analogous move on the thermal side.

The $40 million tail hangs on BitSink's revenue, not on deployed megawatts, manufacturing capacity, or any engineering milestone. That condition says the purchase is a distribution deal: the cooling half already has customers, service relationships, and a spec-sheet position with developers, while the sorbent is the unproven half, still in testing, and what the buyer needs is installation crews and developer relationships.

BitSink founder Stan Dyshko described the deal as giving his company resources and relationships to expand manufacturing and reach new customers, and pointed to the chance to combine BitSink's cooling and power infrastructure with AirJoule's atmospheric water generation for data center developers. Matt Jore, AirJoule's founder and CEO, said the acquisition turns his company into a broader infrastructure solutions provider: both are describing a platform assembled from two businesses that sell into the same building.

The currency matters as much as the conditions: the $40 million tail is payable in AirJoule shares, so the people who know the cooling business best are agreeing to hold the buyer's equity for three years — conviction about the water technology, or a buyer that preferred to pay in paper. The coverage does not say which, but either way the BitSink team, which Jore said is joining AirJoule in full, now holds a stake in the sorbent working.

BitSink's pivot is a familiar one, and the argument for it is straightforward: 60kW to 2MW of heat rejection is a band built for mining's densities and now demanded by GPU racks, so a supplier with an installed base and a service network does not have to build a cooling franchise from zero. That is the wager underneath the acquisition, a supply chain shaped by mining being repriced as AI infrastructure, and it likely makes cooling vendors with mining pedigrees the sector's next acquisition targets.

AirJoule's acquisition lands in the middle of a shift in what constrains the buildout: the binding constraints have moved from capital toward power and, increasingly, water — which permits clear, what a campus may consume, and what it must discharge. AirJoule and NZIH are running a trial designed to test whether low-grade waste heat can become usable water inside a working data center, and AirJoule is working with developer Nexus Data Centers to install the technology at a 600MW campus planned in Hubbard, Texas. If the sorbent performs at campus scale, water recovery stops being an efficiency line item and becomes something closer to a siting argument, which would be worth more to a developer than the kilowatts it saves.

The buildout's default language is the unpriced deal — capacity announced without a buyer, a term sheet, or a number, leaving merchant risk with the developer. AirJoule's transaction has a price, which makes it an exception, and the exception is instructive: only $18 million of the $67 million is cash, the rest is the buyer's own paper, and $40 million of it is contingent on revenue that does not exist yet. A disclosed price is not the same thing as a committed one.

The numbers look modest either way: against the 220MW of compute BitSink says its equipment chills, the cash works out to roughly $82,000 a megawatt, and the full $67 million to about $305,000. The comparison flatters the buyer, since chilled compute is not equipment owned and the 220MW is a snapshot rather than an order book, but the order of magnitude explains why a water company could afford a cooling company, and why more of these suppliers will end up inside larger platforms.

Watch whether the package shows up in a single bill of materials. AirJoule already has a developer relationship at a 600MW campus planned for Hubbard, Texas, where its water technology, BitSink's cooling and switchgear, and the same customer's water problem could be specified together. If they are, the acquisition was a channel purchase that worked, and the mining-era cooling suppliers still standing — installed bases, service trucks, and all — will be repriced on the strength of it. The coverage does not say what revenue BitSink must reach to release the final $40 million.