C A S E S T U D Y
ECOLAB’ S APPROACH TO COOLING IN THE DATA CENTRE SPACE
Mukul Girotra, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Ecolab Global High Tech Division
As power densities continue to climb, efficient cooling measures are essential to maintaining uptime and performance. In this conversation, Mukul Girotra, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Ecolab Global High Tech Division, discusses why coolant health and real-time telemetry are now mission-critical for high-density data centres.
Artificial Intelligence is rewriting the thermal rules of data centres. As rack power density surges and direct-to-chip liquid cooling moves from experiment to standard practice, reliability now depends on what flows through the loop.
In this Q & A Mukul Girotra, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Ecolab Global High Tech Division, explains why fluid condition needs to be a key priority for avoiding risk in data centres – and how hidden problems in the liquid can damage performance.
He explains Ecolab’ s‘ sense, analyse and act’ approach to coolant management and why operators need live chemistry, flow and pressure data to tune systems in the moment, leveraging coolant health parameters as leading indicators to drive system optimisation.
He also discusses linking the chip-level technical loop with plant-side utilities for proper system optimisation, plus how digital solutions help operators manage multiple sites with a clear view on real-time performance and benchmarks.
The takeaway is simple: in a hypergrowth market, disciplined coolant health underpins uptime, efficiency and sustainability. It is the difference between unlocking compute power through cooling optimisation and paying for preventable downtime.
Before we begin, tell us a bit about your background
I’ ve been with Ecolab for seven years. I began in our Mining business as the Global Marketing Director before moving on to lead Water Purity Solutions and Textile Care. Since January last year, I’ ve headed the Global High Tech Division, a major Ecolab growth engine.
Before Ecolab, I worked at GE and Cummins. The thread through my career is thermal efficiency. A lot of the equipment I’ ve dealt with generates severe heat, so making that heat work for you rather than against you became second nature. My master’ s is in thermal sciences, so the engineering curiosity already existed. Ecolab attracted me because it lets me combine performance with sustainability, which is precisely what modern digital infrastructure needs.
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