New CoolIT CEO Sees No Slowdown In Data Center Spending

Data center power in the US is ‘going to increase about 10X by 2028,’ CoolIT Systems CEO Jason Waxman tells CRN. ‘We were talking about two kilowatt racks, 10 kilowatt racks. Now we're at 120 kilowatt racks. So there's just no other option. It's got to be a move to liquid cooling.’

New CoolIT Systems CEO Jason Waxman had a warm welcome from some old friends when he walked into the company’s lab on a tour as the company’s new leader: multimeters, and other testing equipment made by Fluke, the company he just left.

“What was kind of fun was walking into the lab here and getting a tour and seeing all the Fluke instruments — seeing the multimeters, the power equipment,” he told CRN. “I'm like, ‘All right, this must be a legitimate place. If they're, they're using our stuff.’”

CoolIT is a 24-year-old Canadian company that develops direct liquid cooling technology that is now in high demand, as the power requirements of the latest GPUs soar and users hunt for ways to keep their racks cool in order to return that power back to the compute they paid for.

“The issue is that we're kind of at a crisis. If you look at the amount of data center power in the U.S., it's like three times the amount of power needed to power in New York City. I mean, it's just a tremendous amount of power that's going to increase about 10X by, you know, 2028,” Waxman told CRN. “We were talking about two kilowatt racks, 10 kilowatt racks. Now we're at 120 kilowatt racks. So there's just no other option. It's got to be a move to liquid cooling.”

Waxman, an Intel veteran with decades of experience leading technology companies working with data centers, said the opportunity in that space is growing larger each year. Even as some of the largest players in data center such as Microsoft and Meta have announced some pullback in data center investment, Waxman and the team at CoolIT see no slowdown in sight.

“We continue to expect that the overall market for data centers is going to be growing at, I'd call it, high teens to low 20s, through the next five or so years,” he told CRN. “As long I've been in the data center business, I've never really seen there be a slowdown. There's always more ideas or need for compute power than there is budget out there.”

He said that only leads to more demand to consume the technology, the supply chains to deliver it, and the electricians, to be able to go build out that capacity. All of that comes back to opportunity for CoolIT.

“There's a lot of work that needs to be done, but we continue to see the demand there,” he said. “I don't think we're seeing any kind of slowdown in the spend.”

Inside of CoolIT innovation is ramping up as the company debuted the OMNI, an all metal coldplate, as well as the CHx2000 CDU, made specifically to address the cooling demands created by the multiple racks of the most advanced designs from Nvidia and AMD with the ability to chill 2,000 KWs, 66 percent more cooling capacity compared to alternate CDUs.

“Those are two products that weren't around last year, that are in this year, that we're continually looking to make sure that we keep up. Because, Nvidia is not slowing down, AMD and Intel are both heating up in terms of their competition in the space, pun intended,” he said. “They're trying to get more performance that requires more power, but the geometries of what they're doing, they're shrinking it as they do it. It creates hot spots, and again, all of those things require more efficient liquid cooling. And what's going to separate companies? It's not just like there's huge demand out there, but it's how innovative can you be about really being efficient, and how you do that, cooling.”

Based in Calgary, Alberta, CoolIT was acquired by private equity powerhouse KKR in May 2023 with plans to expand its cooling solutions across new applications, customers and end-markets.

Founded in 2001, CoolIT has 24 years of experience in liquid cooling, with its technology deployed globally to more than 5 million GPUs and CPUs. The company’s cooling devices allow for greater rack density, better compute performance, and greater power efficiencies in the data center, the company said in a statement.