Ecolab is nearing a deal to acquire CoolIT Systems from KKR for between $4.5 billion and $5 billion, according to reporting by The Wall Street Journal on March 19. An announcement could come as soon as next week, though sources cautioned that nothing has been finalized.
The price range represents an extraordinary markup. When KKR took a majority stake in CoolIT in 2023, the company was valued at roughly $270 million. At the upper end of the reported range, that is an 18x return in three years. Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth investor Mubadala holds a minority stake in the business.
CoolIT manufactures direct liquid cooling systems for data centers. The company started out building cooling hardware for gaming PCs before pivoting to enterprise and hyperscale infrastructure as AI workloads pushed thermal densities beyond what air cooling can handle. Its product line includes cold plates, coolant distribution units, and rack-level liquid cooling assemblies designed for high-density GPU deployments.
Ecolab, a $65 billion industrial services company headquartered in St. Paul, Minnesota, has been building out a data center cooling portfolio for the past several years. The company already operates a water treatment and cooling chemistry business that serves large commercial and industrial facilities. Acquiring CoolIT would give it a hardware platform to anchor what the company has been calling its Cooling-as-a-Service offering, combining fluid management, thermal hardware, and ongoing maintenance into a single contract.
The strategic logic follows the same pattern that drove Schneider Electric to acquire Motivair in 2025 and Eaton to pay $9.5 billion for Boyd Thermal. Large industrial conglomerates are buying their way into the liquid cooling supply chain because the organic path takes too long. The data center liquid cooling market hit $5.52 billion in late 2025, according to Dell'Oro Group, and is projected to reach $15.75 billion by 2030. Operators who can sell integrated cooling systems, not just components, are capturing disproportionate share.
A $270 million entry turning into a potential $5 billion exit in three years tells you something about how fast the liquid cooling market has repriced. In 2023, direct-to-chip cooling was a niche product serving a small number of high-performance computing customers. By 2026, every major hyperscaler has liquid cooling in production or on order for AI training clusters, and the supply chain cannot keep up with demand.
Ecolab shares fell more than 2.4% on the news. The market reaction suggests investors are not yet convinced that the premium is justified. Neither Ecolab nor KKR has commented publicly on the deal terms.
If the acquisition closes at the reported price, it would rank among the largest pure-play cooling transactions in data center history, second only to Eaton's Boyd deal. The cooling supply chain, long treated as a commodity layer beneath the more glamorous compute and networking stacks, now commands valuations that would have seemed absurd half a decade ago. For companies that built the right products at the right time, the repricing has been violent and fast.