Ecolab has moved to acquire CoolIT Systems, a company specializing in liquid cooling, to respond to the rapidly growing data center thermal management market driven by the spread of AI. This move is interpreted as a strategy to directly absorb the cooling demand required for high-performance computing environments by expanding its business scope from water management and hygiene solutions to include data center cooling infrastructure.

Ecolab announced on the 20th that it has signed an agreement to acquire CoolIT Systems for approximately $4.75 billion. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter of 2026, subject to relevant regulatory approvals and standard closing conditions.

Founded in 2001, CoolIT is a company that has been developing liquid cooling systems for data centers. Its main focus is direct chip cooling, and it supplies cooling distribution units (CDUs), cold plates, and manifolds. The company has hyperscale data centers and colocation operators as its key clients, and its revenue for the next 12 months is projected to be approximately $550 million.

The background of this acquisition lies in the increasing heat generated by AI servers. As high-density semiconductors and high-performance computing environments become more prevalent, it has become widely believed that conventional air cooling alone has limitations in terms of power efficiency and thermal control, leading the industry to focus on methods that use liquid to cool heat close to the chip. Accordingly, the data center cooling market is also seeing an accelerating shift from an air conditioning-centric structure to a liquid cooling-based structure.

Through this transaction, Ecolab plans to combine its water management, digital monitoring, and global services organizations with CoolIT's thermal design and hardware capabilities. Based on this, the company intends to establish a cooling system that encompasses everything from design to operation and maintenance, and to expand its business of providing cooling facilities as a service by leveraging its existing data center customer base.

This acquisition is more of a preemptive response aligned with the expansion of AI infrastructure than a simple business diversification. Ecolab anticipates that starting one year after the transaction is completed, organic revenue growth will increase by approximately 1 percentage point and global water business growth by approximately 2 percentage points. As power efficiency and resource management in data centers emerge as key challenges, this deal is interpreted as an example demonstrating the trend of combining cooling technology with the water management business.