Cruel Summer Proves Kind to Madison Air in Largest Industrial IPO of 2000s

The last time there was a debut like this, Britney Spears was topping the charts and the world was stockpiling canned goods for Y2K. 

Madison Air Solutions has officially claimed the title of the largest industrial IPO since UPS in 1999, pricing its $2.23 billion offering at the top of its range and surging 18.5% in its Thursday debut. While the UPS trade was about shipping and express delivery, Madison Air is about cooling the servers that power AI. The Chicago-based company makes climate-control products for both homes and businesses, including brands such as AprilAire, Big Ass Fans and Nortek Data Center Cooling.

Hot, Hot, Hot

The debut was also the largest of 2026 so far, but it’s likely to be eclipsed later this year by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, not to mention OpenAI and Anthropic, which are reportedly queuing up launches of their own.

While IPOs slowed in March, with war between the US, Israel and Iran roiling markets and chilling enthusiasm, they’ve had something of a heat wave this year. During the first quarter, 22 IPOs raised more than $9.4 billion, compared with 15 that raised about $7.9 billion the year before, according to consulting firm PwC. Among them were:

• Forgent Power, a Minnesota-based maker of electrical distribution equipment for AI data centers and electrical grids, which raised $1.51 billion.
• Generate Biomedicines, a Massachusetts-based biotech firm that uses artificial intelligence-driven tech to develop protein-based therapies, which raised $400 million.  

Preferred Shares: While AI companies continue to command investor attention, the market is growing more selective, according to PwC. “Infrastructure, compute, automation and monetizable AI-enabled platforms are receiving stronger support than more speculative application-layer businesses,” the firm said. That may benefit companies like Forgent and Madison Air, which count large data centers among their customers, if the IPO market rebounds as Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon predicts. “There are some very large IPOs that are lined up, and my expectation is a number of them are going to come because it’s important for those businesses and for the capital formation around those businesses,” he said Wednesday. “They are also less sensitive to short-term geopolitical trends.”