Eaton paid $9.55B for Boyd Thermal at 22.5x 2026E adjusted EBITDA. Vertiv paid \~10x for PurgeRite in the same nine-month window. Boyd priced at 2.25x the comparable multiple on a hardware-heavy business. Teardown of the premium.
How KKR captured the AI density inflection on CoolIT, exited to Ecolab at $4.75bn and 29x NTM EBITDA, and set the template every industrial sponsor sitting on a cooling-adjacent asset is now about to run.
OCP standardisation is making the rope substitutable. NVIDIA's GB300, Ecolab's $4.75bn CoolIT deal and CDU/BMS bundling are moving the economics one layer up. Deep-dive with a 100 MW topology calculator, 24 named vendors, and the qualified-path map.
AI is changing the compute-side cooling loop much faster than the facility-side. The layers, qualification as the moat, and where each incremental AI-cooling dollar accrues in the direct-to-chip stack.
Where the market essay named the vendors, this piece explains the physics. What 1,000 W/cm2 at the die actually means, how a hundred-dollar coupling either saves or destroys a rack, and where cooling is going next.
Every watt delivered to a GPU comes back as heat, and at 600kW per rack there is nowhere for it to go but water. Layer-by-layer analysis from die to dry cooler.