A Calgary-founded company that spent more than two decades building quietly in the background of high-performance computing has emerged as one of the city’s biggest tech success stories.
CoolIT Systems, a leader in liquid cooling for data centres, is being acquired by U.S.-based Ecolab for approximately USD $4.75 billion—underscoring how critical thermal management has become in the age of AI.
Founded in 2001 by Brydon Gierl, CoolIT operated as a privately held company for most of its history, raising just over USD $10 million from investors including BDC, nVent, Inovia Capital, Vistara Capital Partners, AVAC Group, and Kline Hill Partners.
For years, the company focused on advanced cooling systems for high-performance computing—quietly building expertise in a niche that is now becoming central to global infrastructure.
That trajectory changed dramatically in 2023.
In May of that year, private equity giant KKR acquired a majority stake in CoolIT at a valuation of roughly USD $270 million, with Mubadala Investment Company joining as a minority investor. As part of that transaction, CoolIT expanded its equity ownership program to make all employees owners of the company.
Less than three years later, the sale to Ecolab represents an extraordinary outcome—valuing the company at approximately USD $4.75 billion and delivering roughly a 17x return for KKR.
The surge reflects a broader shift across the data centre industry.
As AI workloads push compute density to new extremes, traditional air cooling is no longer sufficient. Liquid cooling—once a niche technology—has rapidly become essential infrastructure.
CoolIT has been at the centre of that transition, supplying systems used in deployments powered by leading chipmakers such as Nvidia and AMD, and supporting hyperscale and enterprise environments.
Ecolab’s acquisition signals a growing convergence between industrial systems and digital infrastructure, as companies look to integrate cooling, water management, and energy optimization into a unified stack for AI-era data centres.
For Calgary, the deal is more than a headline exit.
It reinforces the city’s emerging role in the global data centre supply chain—particularly in areas where its deep expertise in energy, thermodynamics, and engineering is directly applicable to next-generation compute infrastructure.
What began as a niche hardware company in Calgary has evolved into a critical piece of the AI stack—and now, a multi-billion-dollar outcome.
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