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.
About the Author
Matt Vincent
Matt Vincent is Editor in Chief of Data Center Frontier, where he leads editorial strategy and coverage focused on the infrastructure powering cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and the digital economy. A veteran B2B technology journalist with more than two decades of experience, Vincent specializes in the intersection of data centers, power, cooling, and emerging AI-era infrastructure. Since assuming the EIC role in 2023, he has helped guide Data Center Frontier’s coverage of the industry’s transition into the gigawatt-scale AI era, with a focus on hyperscale development, behind-the-meter power strategies, liquid cooling architectures, and the evolving energy demands of high-density compute, while working closely with the Digital Infrastructure Group at Endeavor Business Media to expand the brand’s analytical and multimedia footprint. Vincent also hosts The Data Center Frontier Show podcast, where he interviews industry leaders across hyperscale, colocation, utilities, and the data center supply chain to examine the technologies and business models reshaping digital infrastructure. Since its inception he serves as Head of Content for the Data Center Frontier Trends Summit. Before becoming Editor in Chief, he served in multiple senior editorial roles across Endeavor Business Media’s digital infrastructure portfolio, with coverage spanning data centers and hyperscale infrastructure, structured cabling and networking, telecom and datacom, IP physical security, and wireless and Pro AV markets. He began his career in 2005 within PennWell’s Advanced Technology Division and later held senior editorial positions supporting brands such as Cabling Installation & Maintenance, Lightwave Online, Broadband Technology Report, and Smart Buildings Technology. Vincent is a frequent moderator, interviewer, and keynote speaker at industry events including the HPC Forum, where he delivers forward-looking analysis on how AI and high-performance computing are reshaping digital infrastructure. He graduated with honors from Indiana University Bloomington with a B.A. in English Literature and Creative Writing and lives in southern New Hampshire with his family, remaining an active musician in his spare time.
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