CoolIT Systems Names Intel Veteran Jason Waxman As CEO

CoolIT also appointed Chief Operating Officer Patrick McGinn as president. McGinn has spent the last 13 years at CoolIT, with previous roles in product marketing, business development and business operations.

Canada-based liquid-cooling mainstay CoolIT Systems has recruited Intel veteran Jason Waxman as its new CEO, the company announced on Tuesday.

Waxman spent 23 years at Intel where he held executive leadership roles in the cloud platform group, and data center solutions group. He was corporate vice president and chief strategy officer, data centric group, when he left in 2020.

Since then, Waxman has worked as president of Fluke Corp., which makes high-end electronic testing and measurement equipment for commercial, government and scientific professionals.

“I’m honored to join the talented CoolIT team at such a pivotal moment, as the company’s technology plays an increasingly critical role in facilitating sustainable data center growth and enabling the global expansion of AI platforms,” Waxman said in a statement. “I believe that CoolIT’s strong history of innovation will serve as a great foundation for future growth, and I am excited to help take this company to new heights.”

CRN has reached out to CoolIT to speak with Waxman about the new role. The company’s previous CEO, Steve Walton, left the company in October 2024.

“CoolIT is at the forefront of enabling sustainable, high-performance computing, and Jason’s experience and vision will help us lead the next wave of data center innovation,” McGinn said in a statement. “I look forward to working with Jason and the entire CoolIT team as we continue to scale globally, deepen our industry partnerships, and bring advanced direct liquid cooling solutions to more customers worldwide.”

Hyperscale and colocation companies combined are currently spending about $250 billion per year developing and equipping data centers, and that number is constantly growing, according to John Dinsdale of Synergy Research Group, who spoke with CRN earlier this year.

According to their research, worldwide spending on data center hardware and software grew by 34 percent last year, as cloud service providers and enterprises rushed to buy GPUs to support generative AI workloads.

Last week, CoolIT unveiled the new generation of its workhorse coolant distribution unit designed to keep Nvidia’s power hungry Blackwell chips chilly. The CHx2000 is capable of cooling 2 MW racks, which is what is needed to chill12 of Nvidia GB200 NVL72. The 66 percent performance boost comes in an industry leading compact footprint, the company said.

The company said the CHx2000 improves on the pump performance and heat exchanger capacity, while fitting in the same rack space as the CHx1500. Both of the company’s heat exchangers are built with front and back service access and hot swappable pumps, filters and sensors.

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.