Data Center Intelligence: Brandon Peterson, SVP of Business Development, CoolIT Systems

The Data Center Frontier Executive Roundtable features insights from industry executives with lengthy experience in the data center industry.

Here’s a look at the Q3 2025 insights from Brandon Peterson, Senior Vice President of Business Development, CoolIT Systems.

Delivering industry-leading technology that enables customers to push new limits, Brandon Peterson is Senior Vice President of Business Development at CoolIT Systems. Starting at CoolIT in 2016 as a Field Application Engineer, he now leads business development and marketing, including strategy, processes, products, people, and growth.  Innovation, problem-solving and the ability to adapt are driving forces behind Brandon’s collaboration with customers and his team. He is a big picture thinker committed to strategizing and leading CoolIT’s data center business.

Data Center Frontier:  AI workloads are now dominating new data center builds. What are the most critical thermal or water-related risks operators must solve at scale, and how are your solutions evolving to meet that challenge?

Brandon Peterson, CoolIT Systems:  As liquid cooling expands alongside AI, minor issues become major challenges for data center operators. AI factories are pushing for maximum token throughput which requires the rest of the system to run efficiently, ensuring energy is focused on computation rather than cooling. Today’s liquid cooling systems are often not fully optimized from chip through to chiller.

Improving how the technology cooling system loop is designed, from cold plates to Coolant Distribution Units (CDUs), can deliver significant efficiency gains. Furthermore, integrating CDUs with Building Management Systems (BMS) can also help achieve additional energy and operational savings.

The gap is twofold: (1) IT and infrastructure teams are often siloed or struggle to align on fully optimized system requirements and (2) deep expertise in liquid cooling system design and optimization remains limited.

To address these challenges, we collaborate closely with customers from initial component design through system-level implementation to ensure cross-team alignment and fully optimized solutions.

CoolIT cold plates, manifolds and CDUs are engineered for maximum performance within the smallest footprint.

Our CDUs feature advanced communication and monitoring capabilities, including support for Redfish, an increasingly common standard among major data center operators.

While high-performance hardware is essential, seamless integration into the broader system is a key focus at CoolIT. That is where we also work with operators on system design.

Data Center Frontier:  How are you helping data center operators strike a balance between capital expenditure and long-term operational efficiency in thermal and water systems, especially amid AI build urgency?

Brandon Peterson, CoolIT Systems:  We’re proud to offer a technology that improves both capital expenditures (CapEx) and long-term operational efficiency (OpEx), especially when compared to legacy air-cooling solutions.

While data center operators are increasingly adopting liquid cooling to meet the thermal requirements of modern processors, the technology also brings valuable secondary benefits. Liquid cooling enables data centers to reduce or eliminate a substantial part of the air-cooling infrastructure that would otherwise be required.

In terms of efficiency, liquid cooling lowers the power server fans consume, reduces the need for air conditioning and air handling within the data hall, and decreases the load on facility-level equipment, especially when systems are designed for warm-water operation.

With AI data centers now being built at gigawatt scale, the resulting CapEx and OpEx savings are significant.

Data Center Frontier:  How are your customers rethinking the integration of thermal, water, and power systems as AI infrastructure scales, and what role is your company playing in breaking down legacy silos between them?

Brandon Peterson, CoolIT Systems:  Silos between thermal, water and power systems still exist and often extend to IT teams, as liquid cooling creates a tighter link between IT and facility infrastructure.

In the past, maintaining an average kilowatt rating per rack along with standard ASHRAE air temperature guidelines were typically sufficient to keep IT equipment within required thermal limits.

Today, data centers must consider water temperatures, flow rates, pressure levels, system resiliency and redundancy. In an air-cooled data center, a cooling system failure may result in a gradual temperature rise, giving IT equipment several minutes or even hours before throttling or shutdown is needed.

In contrast, liquid-cooled environments require operators to monitor and manage system parameters at a much finer time scale (often within seconds) to avoid thermal excursions.

CoolIT helps break down these silos by: (1) designing products and services with stringent customer requirements in mind; (2) providing system-level expertise across the entire liquid cooling chain from cold plates to CDUs; and (3) identifying and mitigating complexities and risks based on years of hands-on experience.

While the liquid cooling market has grown rapidly with many new entrants over the past two years, CoolIT has been deploying liquid cooling in the data center at scale since 2017.

That experience is embedded in our systems and processes, allowing us to help customers avoid risks and solve challenges we've already encountered and overcome firsthand.

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