Private equity firm 26North Partners has signed a deal to buy MEI Industrial Solutions, the Dallas company that rigs, moves and sets heavy equipment in data centers, chip plants and factories. The MEI Industrial Solutions acquisition is expected to close in the fourth quarter. Neither side put a price on it.
26North announced the agreement Oct. 15. The seller is Olympus Partners, which bought the business, then called MEI Rigging & Crating, in 2023. Jefferies advised 26North and Lazard advised MEI. The deal still needs regulatory approvals.
What MEI Industrial Solutions does on a jobsite
MEI’s pitch is that it owns the stretch between a manufacturer’s loading dock and the equipment’s final pad. That covers rigging, machinery moving and setting, crating and export packaging, plus storage and staging. It’s the scope that sits between the GC’s schedule and the electrical and mechanical subs waiting to land their connections.
The company lists data centers, semiconductors, EV and battery plants, aerospace and defense, life sciences and industrial manufacturing as end markets. It has about 2,500 employees, 30 operating locations and 90 storage facilities with roughly 10 million square feet of industrial storage. It was founded in 1990.
Storage is the part to watch. Data center owners are buying switchgear, generators and cooling units months before a building can take them, and somebody has to hold that gear, insure it and get it to the right pad on the right day. A rigger with its own warehouse network sells into that problem directly.
How Olympus grew the rigging business
Olympus’s own sale release lays out the roll-up. Under its ownership, MEI went from 16 locations to 30, opened in Chicago, Miami, Providence and Richmond, and quadrupled indoor storage to more than 10 million square feet. It also closed seven acquisitions. The release doesn’t give revenue or earnings for any year.
CEO Doug Dayton joined in 2023 after 16 years running PSI and Eurofins USA. 26North says its operating team will work with his management group on people, equipment and training. That’s standard private equity language, and it doesn’t say whether more acquisitions are planned. Given the last three years, they probably are.
Why buyers want data center equipment services
The interest isn’t hard to read. Electrical contractors on hyperscale jobs are working 12- to 18-month schedules with truckloads of material arriving every week, and every late set pushes the trades behind it. Specialty firms that control a bottleneck have become acquisition targets across the sector, from heavy civil to Florida site work.
The risk is concentration. MEI’s growth story leans on the same end markets everyone else is chasing, and its new owner hasn’t said how much of the backlog is tied to data centers. If hyperscaler spending cools, a rigging and storage network sized for 2026 demand gets expensive to carry. For now, 26North is betting the equipment keeps arriving faster than the buildings can take it.