ST. PAUL, Minn., March 20 — Ecolab announced today that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire CoolIT Systems, a high-growth, high-margin leader in liquid cooling technology for next-gen AI data centers. CoolIT is expected to generate approximately $550 million in sales over the next 12 months. With CoolIT’s rapid sales growth, the acquisition is expected to significantly strengthen the company’s Global High-Tech growth engine and accelerate Global Water’s organic sales growth rate by 2% and Ecolab’s total organic sales growth rate by 1%. The acquisition, from funds managed by KKR, positions Ecolab as a comprehensive cooling solutions provider by advancing its capabilities across the rapidly growing data center market.
CoolIT is a pure-play data center liquid cooling company with end-to-end capabilities that designs and manufactures high-performance liquid cooling systems, including coolant distribution units (CDUs), cold plates and direct-to-chip cooling technologies. With more than 25 years of experience, their technology helps the world’s largest hyperscale and colocation operators run more efficiently and reliably. As data centers shift from air cooling to liquid cooling to support rising compute demands, CoolIT’s mission-critical technologies provide the performance needed for advanced AI workloads.
By combining CoolIT’s anchor thermal engineering technologies and design excellence with Ecolab’s expertise in water, chemistry, fluid management, digital monitoring and global service, Ecolab is bolstering its Cooling-as-a-Service offering. This integrated solution helps AI data centers improve performance, reduce downtime and lower water use across their operations.
Under the terms of the agreement, Ecolab will pay approximately $4.75 billion in cash at the closing of the transaction, subject to customary adjustments. This represents 29x and 24x estimated next 12-month and 2027 adjusted EBITDA for CoolIT.
“AI is transforming the demands on data centers, and liquid cooling is one of the critical technologies that makes advanced computing possible,” said Christophe Beck, Ecolab chairman and chief executive officer. “By bringing together CoolIT’s engineered cooling technologies with Ecolab’s expertise in water, chemistry and digital service, we can provide our customers a complete cooling solution that improves performance and reliability while reducing water and energy use. This acquisition expands our role in serving the AI ecosystem—semiconductor fabs that manufacture chips, power plants that fuel the chips, and data centers that utilize the chips—and positions Ecolab as the partner that the world’s largest technology companies rely on to grow responsibly and sustainably.”
