Gradian Thermal Solutions: Building for the AI Infrastructure Boom

[music] Hello everyone. Welcome to JSAT TV where we're covering the latest stories, trends, and innovations in the digital infrastructure industry. We have a very special firsttime JSA TV guest with us today uh to talk about a a new brand rolling out into the industry, Gradient Thermal Solutions. So, I've got John Schneider here, CEO of Gradian. Welcome, John. Thank you for joining us. >> Thanks, Candace. I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me. >> Absolutely. I'm so excited to to jump right into it. So, um first of all, I always like to start kind of on the human level first and then we'll get into the company level. So, for anyone um who hasn't crossed paths with you yet, can you just tell us a little bit of background about yourself and how you became CEO of Gradian? >> Sounds great. I'd be happy to. So um I've been in heating and air conditioning related industries for 26 years now. Uh a lot of time with Emerson Electric in in their compression and controls businesses. Uh also as part of Emerson and then later part of Verdive of what became a a data center infrastructure focused business. So spent uh seven plus years leading global thermal management in data centers. Um, and then most recently with Copeland, you know, a former business of Emerson Electric, really a global technology leader around compression and and controls. But really what attracted me to to get involved with this great team we have here at Gradian is the investment in growth, the investment in technology, uh, and, you know, the the opportunity to best support the dynamics that we're seeing in this market with with three really great businesses coming together to form a thermal platform. We have a a great history around air cooling with mass HVAC business. Been in the industry for 16 years. A lot of great expertise around focus on the customer and technology combined with Deep Cool AI. You know, a a team and business really focused on liquid cooling and the technology associated with the liquid cooling infrastructure. and more recently a company that we acquired called Eco Chillers which is a technology leader as well as just worldclass workmanship around high efficiency chillers. So now we have a a full end toend thermal platform, the right technology, great team and I'm just excited to be a part of it. >> Amazing. Yeah, thank you for giving us that background on bringing these incredible companies together into one one brand. Um so let's talk a little bit more about the launch of Gradient Thermal Solutions. So you gave us the the brief background there. Um can you talk a little bit more about why now? >> Absolutely. Well, you you know the statistics and I I know everybody sees it every single day around the the increasing demand in AI workloads. Demand is has been growing significantly. Demand is expected to double over the next two years. uh you know with AI training and inference and continued compute expansion over time AI is expected to represent 50% of data capacity by 20 20 data center capacity by 2030. Frankly, I think it's probably going faster and greater than that. So this is a long-term macro trend uh with a lot of strong dynamics as that infrastructure gets built out. So the time is now. The time is now to have uh the ability to respond quickly to customers that are driving rapid deployment with engineered solutions. And that's what we we have really sought to do is invest to have the right endto-end technology with the three businesses coming together to have a a strong platform around air cooling, liquid cooling, and heat rejection to provide a true endto-end thermal management systems and solutions portfolio that then we can then support our customers with the capacity that we're investing. We've now more than doubled our manufacturing capacity. literally started up a new factory recently here uh in the last month and so that's really helping us better serve our customers. So the the time is now. AI infrastructure is scaling. Our customers need rapid response and deployment and we have the right technology and and culture in the organization to really best support our customers needs. >> Amazing. Yeah, that's incredible. Um congrats on the all of the the wins that you listed there with the um expanded manufacturing facility. Um culture is so important especially as companies are having to scale so rapidly to keep up with AI demand. So um that's huge. Um so as you said uh Gradient is coming to market as a full stack thermal solutions partner. So what would you say is the advantage um of partnering with a company that has that kind of full stack approach? Um what does that mean for a developer or an operator? Well, you mentioned you mentioned culture, which maybe now is the right time to really talk about that because you think about what this really means for our customers and and the partners down channel that we serve and support. You know, it starts with, you know, why why we're here in the first place. Why do we exist? You know, our our mission is really to rapidly develop and deliver innovative solutions that best meet and exceed the needs of our customers. And we have really strong capabilities that allow us to do that. I I've not seen a more customer focused customer responsive organization and that's that's a feedback we get from our customers of that of that gradient is exceptionally customer focused when that comes from the fact that you know we've engineered solutions in the past we have a process and a capability to be able to do that we expect that to continue going forward build on top of that having innovation and technology to bring to design new solutions uh and and bring more value to our customers operational excellence as we expand capacity and drive continuous improvement in performing for our customers every day. But importantly, I I truly see this as one of the most engaged talented teams. A very strong set of talent that work very well together, which again comes back to culture. You know, our culture is really focused on one team working together, focused on our customers, really driving continuous improvement in what we do every single day and and respecting each other and treating each other as they want to be treated. And that's really the foundation of everything that we do and allows us to to really bring some advantages to the partners that we work with in mission critical applications. >> I love that. That's really well said. A very value and missiondriven company is what I'm gathering. Um, so we we need more of that. Absolutely. Um, and so last question for you. As we've been chatting about, of course, data centers are being completely reimagined right now from the ground up to handle everything that AI is throwing at them. So what does that mean in your view for how thermal solutions will evolve um, alongside data centers? >> Well, it it it's very dynamic and as the markets move very quickly, we need to be able to respond and move quickly as well. And and that's not new. If you think about how data centers have evolved in the past, there was a migration from you know an enterprised raised floor traditional data center cool thermal management design to the you know as cloud emerged as collocation emerged that fundamentally changed the architecture and the kinds of cooling technologies needed to now fast forward to and oh by the way at that that time high performance computing was probably less than 2% of the market. you know, was it was really more researchbased um applications kind of niche, but you know, something that, you know, organizations that really wanted to think about the future, you know, kept a pulse on, kept a kept aware of and kept innovating, kept technology uh in their portfolios to be prepared for that fundamental shift, which is what we're seeing now. this this dramatic transformation enabled by enduse applications around AI high performance computing enabled by GPU chip technology but then the fundamental change in thermal management solutions to to to provide uh the to effectively and efficiency efficiently remove th that that source of heat from those critical applications. So um so it's happened historically and we have the the flexibility and and engineering culture to be able to respond to future system architectures as GPU topographies continue to change inference deployments edge deployments continue to build out which will continue to change you what the right solution is for those sites going forward. So th so so historically we've seen it we see those trends continuing. It's about being fast, nimble, flexible um and responsive to customer needs. Absolutely. I think that's the perfect note to end on. Uh thank you so much, John, for joining us on JSATV and uh allowing us to be a platform where you launch Gradient Thermal Solutions. Really exciting stuff. And um and thank you to all of our viewers for hanging out with us um as always on JSATV. Happy networking, everyone. >> Thanks, Candace. >> Thank you. >> [music]