CoolIT Systems has officially joined Ecolab, cementing one of Calgary’s biggest technology exits and giving the liquid cooling company a larger platform as AI data centre demand surges.
Ecolab announced today that it has closed its acquisition of CoolIT in a deal valued at approximately USD $4.75 billion. The transaction brings Calgary-founded CoolIT into Ecolab’s expanding high-tech business, which spans water systems for chip manufacturing, power generation, and now direct liquid cooling for high-density AI data centres.
Founded in 2001, CoolIT spent more than two decades developing advanced cooling systems for high-performance computing. That expertise has become increasingly critical as AI workloads push data centre density, power use, and thermal demands higher.
Ecolab said CoolIT’s year-to-date sales have grown more than 100%, driven by accelerating demand for liquid cooling across AI infrastructure.
The company is already moving to integrate CoolIT into a broader platform. At Supercomputing in Chicago this November, Ecolab plans to introduce a new end-to-end 3D TRASAR cooling platform combining CoolIT cooling distribution units and cold plates with Ecolab’s digital optimization tools and advanced cooling fluids.
Ecolab said the platform is designed to give operators real-time performance visibility, reduce cooling power demand, improve efficiency, and support closed-loop cooling approaches that move data centres toward a near-zero water footprint.
The acquisition also sharpens Ecolab’s AI infrastructure ambitions. The company said its Global High-Tech business has grown from roughly $150 million in annual sales in 2021 to an annualized run rate approaching $1.5 billion in 2026 following the additions of Ovivo and CoolIT. Ecolab is targeting $4 billion in annual sales from the business by 2030.
For Calgary, the deal marks a major local success story. CoolIT grew from a niche hardware company into a global supplier for the AI infrastructure market, proving that cooling has become a strategic pillar of the data centre economy.
As AI reshapes global compute infrastructure, CoolIT’s next chapter begins inside one of the world’s largest water technology companies.
For data centres, the takeaway is simple: cooling is no longer back-end infrastructure. It is now central to scaling AI.