Eole, a Tokyo company listed on the Growth market of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, said on October 15, 2026 that its board had approved a share exchange that will make WOODMAN, a Tokyo-based seller of AI servers and builder of modular AI data centres, a wholly owned subsidiary. The two companies signed the share exchange agreement the same day.
Eole chose to pay in its own shares rather than cash. The company said this would give WOODMAN's shareholders a stake in the combined group's future and keep cash available for building data centres. It did not publish a value for the deal in its announcement.
WOODMAN plans to hold an extraordinary shareholder meeting in November 2026 to approve the exchange, which Dealroom reports is expected to take effect on November 30. WOODMAN's chief executive Shinjiro Ono and the rest of its management and staff will stay with the business.
What WOODMAN built
WOODMAN was founded in October 2017 and is based in Shinagawa, Tokyo. It started by selling AI servers and storage and helping customers install them, then moved into designing and building modular AI data centres and advising on data centre development.
In September 2026 it launched IMMERSIA and IMMERSIA EDGE, immersion cooling products in which servers are submerged in fluid to remove heat. It has been working with Castrol's lubricants business to promote them.
WOODMAN expects sales of ¥12.85 billion and operating profit of ¥350 million for the year to September 2026. Dealroom put those figures at about $98.8 million and $2.7 million. The company also sells complete hardware set-ups for AI and simulation work.
Why Eole is buying
Eole is building what it calls an AI economic zone made of three layers: AI applications, AI computing and on-chain finance. Its AI infrastructure business started in April 2025 by buying and selling GPU servers and passed ¥10 billion in sales in the year to March 2026.
The company is now developing distributed AI data centres in Futaba in Fukushima prefecture and Satsumasendai in Kagoshima, and from autumn 2026 plans to start offering computing capacity as a so-called neocloud, combining GPUs, data centres, power, cooling, networking and operations. In July 2026 it signed a preliminary agreement with Shin Energy Development to build a data centre of about 100 megawatts in western Japan.
Eole said taking WOODMAN in-house would give it the data centre design, building and cooling skills it needs alongside its GPU purchasing. It aims for a power usage effectiveness of 1.2 or lower with immersion cooling, compared with a national average it put at about 1.57, and plans to run large sites for training and inference alongside smaller sites of around 2 megawatts that can be built quickly on existing land and power connections.
A partnership that became a takeover
The two companies were already working together. In January 2026 they signed a memorandum on modular AI data centres with Digital Dynamic and SuperX AI Industries, with WOODMAN helping on sites and utilities for Eole's projects. In September 2026 they jointly hosted a conference on immersion cooling that drew more than 160 people from the data centre industry.
Eole said bringing the business inside the group would speed up decisions on projects, investment, staffing and budgets that previously had to be agreed between two companies.
The company acknowledged that issuing new shares will dilute existing shareholders, and said it expects the value created by combining WOODMAN's revenue, technology and customers with its own AI infrastructure plans to outweigh that dilution over time.
Eole said it will judge future fundraising and acquisitions by whether they raise long-term shareholder value rather than simply making the company bigger. It added that the combined group intends to use both companies' networks in Japan and abroad to find new data centre sites and joint projects.
