nVent Electric announced Monday it will acquire Maverick Power, a McKinney, Texas-based switchgear manufacturer, for $1.75 billion in cash. The transaction, disclosed via regulatory filing and confirmed through Reuters, marks nVent's largest acquisition in a decade and lands the London-domiciled, St. Louis Park-operated company squarely inside the high-voltage switching layer of hyperscale data center builds. Maverick was founded in 2018. The implied valuation is $292 million per year of operating history.
Maverick manufactures medium-voltage switchgear and power distribution equipment engineered for the thermal and electrical loads AI training clusters generate. The company's product line includes 15kV and 35kV switchgear assemblies that handle power densities approaching 100 kilowatts per rack, triple the load profile of traditional enterprise data centers. Maverick ships modular, pre-tested switchgear units that can be deployed in eight to twelve weeks, compared to the sixteen to twenty-four weeks required for custom-engineered assemblies from legacy manufacturers. The speed premium matters when hyperscalers are racing to light 500-megawatt campuses before model training windows close.
The deal places nVent inside the critical path for every new AI data center being permitted in North America. Switchgear sits between the utility substation and the data hall, managing fault protection and load distribution. Maverick's customer base includes undisclosed hyperscalers and colocation operators building in Phoenix, Northern Virginia, and North Texas, where power availability is determining site selection before fiber or tax incentives. nVent already sells electrical enclosures and thermal management systems to data center operators, but lacked the medium-voltage switching products that command 18-22% gross margins and multi-year service contracts. The acquisition gives nVent a $400-500 million annual revenue stream with embedded maintenance relationships that extend fifteen to twenty years past initial deployment.
The price reflects the scarcity of manufacturers capable of meeting UL and IEEE standards while compressing lead times. Maverick's McKinney facility produces switchgear with 99.97% uptime ratings under full load, a specification hyperscalers require but few vendors can document. The company employs 420 people, implying a per-employee acquisition cost above $4 million, typical for precision electrical manufacturing with deep utility certifications. nVent is financing the transaction with $1.2 billion in new term debt and $550 million in cash, raising its net leverage to approximately 3.2x EBITDA. Management stated the acquisition will be accretive to earnings within twelve months, assuming Maverick maintains its current $85-95 million EBITDA run rate.
Allocators should track nVent's ability to cross-sell Maverick's switchgear into its existing enclosure contracts, particularly with the seven hyperscalers nVent already serves. The company's thermal management division generated $780 million in revenue last year, most of it tied to liquid cooling systems for GPU clusters. Pairing switchgear with cooling infrastructure creates a bundled offering that reduces procurement complexity and compresses commissioning timelines by four to six weeks. Any erosion in Maverick's delivery lead times or uptime performance will surface in Q4 bookings, when hyperscalers finalize 2025 campus build schedules. Watch for nVent's October earnings call, where management will likely provide updated data center revenue guidance and detail integration milestones for Maverick's Texas manufacturing operations.
The transaction closes in Q4 2024, subject to standard regulatory clearance. Maverick will operate as a standalone unit within nVent's Enclosures segment, preserving its existing customer relationships and McKinney production footprint. The founders are not remaining with the business post-close.