CoolIT employees on Wednesday after they found out how much of a bonus they would receive after the company was sold to Ecolab.Todd Korol/The Globe and Mail
Hundreds of employees at a Calgary tech company are about to get a cash windfall.
On Wednesday afternoon, about 650 workers at CoolIT, a cooling technology supplier, learned they’re getting cash payouts averaging US$240,000. The monster bonuses follow the company’s announcement of its blockbuster sale to a Minnesota-based business last week.
“I cannot even process it – to set it in my mind this is actually happening,” CoolIT employee Kenneth Kong said on Wednesday afternoon, clutching the ripped envelope revealing his payout amount. Mr. Kong, a quality-assurance specialist, started at the company in 2011 when it had 22 employees and its technology was focused on cooling gaming consoles – entirely different from its tech that now cools the toasty, high-powered computers inside data centres.
Last Friday, CoolIT was purchased by Ecolab Inc. ECL-N of St. Paul, Minn., for US$4.75-billion in cash. Rivalled by only a handful of deals over the past 20 years, the sale is one of the largest exits ever in Canada’s technology sector.
CoolIT builds efficient cooling systems for data centres, which have surged in demand since the late-2022 rollout of ChatGPT and widespread adoption of artificial intelligence.
CoolIT’s 650 employees became owners in the business in 2023, when private equity giant KKR & Co. Inc. acquired the company.
As a result, employees are set to receive between one to eight years of annual pay, based on tenure and salary, the company said in a statement after markets closed on Wednesday.
Employees on the manufacturing floor at CoolIT's lab in Calgary on Wednesday.Todd Korol/The Globe and Mail
The payouts, to be delivered in the fall, were announced Wednesday afternoon by CoolIT and KKR executives in a white tent planted atop the company’s parking lot.
KKR managing director Kyle Matter unveiled the payout amounts on an elevated stage like a game-show host, with employees’ responding to the news with ear-splitting cheers. Some colleagues huddled and jumped together; others exchanged hugs with tears in their eyes. Executives stood on the sidelines, filming with their phones.
The newest employees who started in 2026 are set to earn at least $35,000. Those payouts increase dramatically, up to a minimum $95,000 for those who started in 2025 – jumping to at least $490,000 for those, like Mr. Kong, who joined CoolIT in 2016 or earlier.
“This is a one-in-a-lifetime moment for people. It’s like winning the lottery,” said Jerin Varghese, a test-team lead who started with the company in 2021. Employees who joined that year will be paid at least $275,000, or six times their annual salary.
KKR, CoolIT’s owner, bought the company in 2023 for US$270-million, just as spending on massive global data centres supporting the widespread adoption of AI was taking off. KKR will earn about 15 times the original equity it invested in CoolIT.
“We knew the data centre world was moving to liquid cooling,” Mr. Matter said. “We thought it would play out over four, five, six, seven years. It played out in 12 months.”
“We had the right thesis, and we got very fortunate with how quickly things played out.”
The Calgary company is also partly owned by Abu Dhabi-based sovereign wealth fund Mubadala Investment Co.
Ecolab, the Minnesota company, is a New York Stock Exchange-listed provider of water, hygiene and infection-prevention products and services with US$16-billion in annual sales.
Founded 25 years ago, CoolIT started by making liquid cooling technology for gaming computers before expanding in 2012 to serve the supercomputer business. It entered the AI business a decade later.
It says liquid-cooled data centres use between 30 and 40 per cent less energy for cooling while also reducing water consumption.
The company worked with equipment manufacturers in the years before data centres surged in demand, said Patrick McGinn, CoolIT’s president and chief operating officer. That primed the company to respond to the rapid acceleration in large language models, as AI companies turned to liquid cooling for their hot, energy-intensive sites.
“The industry really took on a new meaning – a new turn – at that point,” Mr. McGinn said.
CoolIT’s growth has made it one of Canada’s largest privately held technology companies in recent years, and one of at least 25 to surpass US$300-million in annual revenues, according to a recent Globe and Mail survey.
Mr. McGinn said the company recently signed a lease for 150,000 square feet of new space in Calgary. The company may see optimizations in the near future, he said, but there are few signs that its footprint in the city will change.
“If I have anything to say about it, we’ll be here,” he said.