The gaming market is a cruel ecosystem, where many brands that once dominated the overclocking forums are today just a vague memory in the memory of more veterans. However, there are exceptions of companies that, far from sinking, knew how to read market signals and pivot in time. This is the case of CoolIT, a brand that manufactured liquid cooling for gaming and that today it is a key piece in the gear that moves artificial intelligence, one that is worth billions.
3,000 million. This is what CoolIT is worth today, or rather it is the value at which KKR is trying to sell it. The controversial investment fund bought the company in 2023 for 270 million dollars and now, just three years later, they aspire to multiply their initial investment tenfold, according to Financial Times. CoolIT is no longer in the business of cooling gaming PCs, its business is now focused on the data centers that power AI.
The beginnings. The company was founded by two Canadian gaming enthusiasts in 2001, when the concept of gaming PCs was beginning to take shape. To better understand the moment, it was the time of Windows 98, the most cutting-edge graphics card was the NVIDIA GeForce 3, the processors were Pentium 4 and RAM was measured in megabytes.
In this context, CoolIT launched itself into the manufacture of liquid cooling systems and, although it was not one of the top brands (it worked more as OEM for others like Corsair), had several important milestones. One of them was the launch of Domino ALC which was much lighter than other similar systems and hardly required maintenance. In 2009 they patented their SplitFlow cooling plate technologywhich represented an important leap in the sector.
From PC to data centers. 2012 marked the turning point for the company. Its focus shifted to data centers, creating direct liquid cooling systems for servers. In 2015 they started a collaboration with Hewlett Packardproviding cooling to its HPE Cray supercomputers and HPE Apollo servers. They also put the cooling of the Dell servers since 2017.
CoolIT in the age of AI. At the moment The construction of data centers is at an unstoppable pace and faces various problems. Energy is the most seriousbut refrigeration is not far behind and even has been the subject of controversy due to water consumption. Against this backdrop, CoolIT was in the perfect position to ride the AI wave and currently has a catalog of high-end solutions, such as its distribution solutions (CDU) capable of supplying up to 2,000 kW of liquid cooling capacity for large AI and high-performance computing server farms.
The future. At the moment the sale of CoolIT is in an early phase, but KKR would already have several possible buyers. According to the Financial Times, there are around 3,000 data centers under construction in the US alone, which for companies like CoolIT is a very important moment of growth. There have already been other billion-dollar transactions by companies dedicated to refrigeration, such as Boyd Thermal (9.5 billion) either PurgeRite (1 billion). The case of these companies does not remember that AI is not only about OpenAI, Anthropic or Google DeepMind, there is a whole ecosystem of companies making money with this.
Image | Wikipedia, Microsoft
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