The Globe and Mail reports in its Thursday, March 26, edition that about 650 employees at Calgary's CoolIT, a cooling technology supplier, will receive cash payouts averaging $240,000 following the company's recent sale to a Minnesota-based business (all figures U.S.). The Globe's Matthew Scace writes that last Friday, CoolIT was purchased by Ecolab of St. Paul, Minn., for $4.75-billion in cash. The sale is one of the largest exits ever in Canada's technology sector. CoolIT builds efficient cooling systems for data centres, which have surged in demand since the late-2022 rollout of OpenAI's ChatGPT and widespread adoption of artificial intelligence. CoolIT's 650 employees became owners in the business in 2023, when KKR & Co. acquired the company. As a result, employees are set to receive between one to eight years of annual pay, based on tenure and salary. KKR, CoolIT's owner, bought the company in 2023 for $270-million, just as spending on massive global data centres supporting the widespread adoption of AI was taking off. KKR will earn about 15 times the original equity it invested in CoolIT. Ecolab trades on the New York Stock Exchange. It generates $16-billion in annual sales.