Gene Lowe and the value of keeping things cool

The future has a temperature problem. A data center can contain expensive computing equipment and ambitious plans, but somebody still has to carry away the heat. Gene Lowe has spent a substantial part of his working life on that rather practical proposition. Long before the current demand for data center cooling, he was president of SPX’s global evaporative cooling business. In 2026, as chief executive, he is overseeing an expansion that brings his earlier operating experience back into the center of the story.

There is something pleasingly literal about this career arc. Corporate leaders often talk about returning to their roots. Lowe’s roots include cooling towers. They are less picturesque than a founder’s garage, perhaps, but considerably more useful on a hot day. His path offers a way into an industrial company whose products do their work in buildings, underground infrastructure, and navigation systems, usually without attracting much notice from the people who depend on them.

In July 2026, Lowe reported that initial assembly of the Olympus Max cooling product was underway at SPX’s Madison, Alabama facility. The company raised its estimate of annual data center revenue capacity to approximately $1.1 billion once fully in production. Capacity is a statement about what a business expects to be able to supply, rather than money already earned. Still, the scale gives a sense of the assignment: turn demand into equipment that can actually leave a factory.

That is where Lowe’s story becomes more interesting than a stock chart. He arrived at SPX in 2008, became CEO in 2015, and has spent the intervening years helping reshape what the company owns and makes. The current cooling opportunity sits within that longer sequence of operating jobs, disposals, acquisitions, and product development. The equipment may be newly fashionable. The work behind it has been accumulating for years.

Seven years before the corner office

Lowe graduated from Virginia Tech’s Pamplin College of Business in 1990 with a degree in management science. He later attended Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, earning his MBA with distinguished honors. His Tuck years were 1994 to 1996. These are useful coordinates for a career that has moved between the analysis of businesses and responsibility for making them run.

Before SPX, his employers included Andersen Consulting, Bain & Company, Lazard Technology Partners, and Milliken & Company. The public record supports that range of experience without requiring a neat origin myth. Consulting, technology investment, and manufacturing all appear in his background. By the time SPX hired him, he had worked in settings concerned with how companies compete, where capital goes, and what industrial businesses produce.

His first SPX role was vice president of global business development and marketing for Thermal Equipment and Services, from 2008 to 2010. Then came three years leading Global Evaporative Cooling. From 2013 to 2015 he was president of the broader Thermal Equipment and Services segment. He became a corporate officer in 2014. The steps matter because they put an operating apprenticeship beneath the eventual chief executive’s title.

A strategy role invites a person to decide where a business should go. Running a cooling business adds responsibility for getting it there. Lowe had occupied both kinds of seat before September 2015, when he became SPX’s president and CEO. His advancement was internal, over seven years. The company he would lead, however, was about to acquire a substantially different shape.

A company changes by choosing

The 2015 separation created two publicly traded companies: SPX FLOW and SPX Corporation. Lowe led the latter. At that point, its organization included HVAC, Detection & Measurement, and Engineered Solutions. The distinction between the two SPX names remains useful for anyone trying to follow his career. His subsequent record belongs to the infrastructure equipment company that eventually became SPX Technologies.

The reshaping continued. In 2016, SPX divested its Dry Cooling and Balcke-Dürr businesses. In 2021, it sold SPX Transformer Solutions, the remaining business in Engineered Solutions. These choices narrowed the company’s focus toward HVAC and Detection & Measurement. A portfolio gets its character from what leaves as well as what arrives. For Lowe, the chief executive’s job has included both kinds of decision.

Additions gave that focus more substance. Sealite expanded aids to navigation in 2021. Enterprise Control Systems joined that year too, combining with TCI to form the Communication Technologies platform. Cincinnati Fan added engineered air movement. International Tower Lighting followed in 2022, extending the navigation offering. This is growth assembled through particular capabilities: lighting, communications, fans. The nouns are refreshingly difficult to confuse with a motivational slogan.

In August 2022, SPX Corporation adopted the name SPX Technologies. Lowe’s shareholder letter connected the change to technology that improved customers’ experience. His examples included a mobile tool giving boiler technicians access to product information and software helping customers compare cooling products. They illustrate the sort of innovation involved: making an existing industrial task easier to perform, select, or service.

One detail puts the new name in perspective. Marley Cooling Towers marked its centenary in 2022. Lowe was running a company that could introduce digital tools while celebrating a cooling brand established a hundred years earlier. Industrial renewal often happens at that meeting point. A familiar customer problem persists; the equipment and the information surrounding it become more capable.

The factory has the next word

The next stage requires more than collecting businesses. In July 2026, SPX completed its acquisition of Montreal-based Neptronic for approximately US$430 million. Neptronic brought controls, electric duct heaters, humidifiers, actuators, and valves. Its roughly 300 employees and approximately US$75 million in annual revenue represented an established operating business, with products SPX intended to take through a wider network of customers and sales channels.

The stated plan combined expansion with continuity: provide capital and operating resources while preserving Neptronic’s engineering culture and speed to market. That is an intention whose success has to be demonstrated after a deal closes. It also describes the practical balance in Lowe’s assignment. A larger owner wants the benefits of scale while retaining the knowledge that made the acquired business worth buying.

At the same time, the existing factories have their own demands. SPX’s second-quarter 2026 HVAC revenue rose to $480.6 million from $376.7 million a year earlier. Yet segment margin fell from 25.4 percent to 22.8 percent. The company identified capacity expansion start-up costs and inefficiencies, tariffs, inflation, and differences in the prior year’s business mix among the reasons. More orders do not automatically make every operating measure move in the same direction.

Lowe has discussed this level of detail before. During a 2022 earnings call, he described a supply chain council spreading practices across the businesses, including visibility into bills of materials and future stocking positions. It is an unglamorous subject until a missing component holds up a shipment. Then it becomes the whole subject. His description supplies a concrete example of the coordination behind the corporate phrase “business system.”

Back to the stadium

There is another place to see Lowe’s approach, away from acquisition announcements. In May 2025, he returned to Virginia Tech as a Pamplin commencement speaker at Lane Stadium. The graduate of 1990 was addressing a new class, with the intervening decades represented by a career spanning consulting, investment, manufacturing, and industrial leadership.

His advice concentrated on continued learning, useful skills, and calculated chances in growing areas. “Build your skills and make them future-proof,” he told the graduates. A commencement platform can encourage rather airy prescriptions. These were instructions that could be put on a short to-do list. They also fit the recurring choices in his working life: acquire capabilities, keep learning, and accept responsibility for a larger task.

His university connections extend beyond a return visit. He serves with Virginia Tech’s Apex Center for Entrepreneurs. In September 2025, Tuck announced his appointment to its Board of Advisors, a group that provides counsel on the school’s strategy and operations. The appointment returned a 1996 graduate to the institution in a different capacity. Education appears in his biography as an ongoing relationship as well as an early credential.

He also joined Federal Signal’s board in 2019 and chairs its Compensation and Benefits Committee. That adds an outside director’s perspective to his executive responsibilities at SPX. His professional life consequently includes the work of running one company, overseeing another, and advising institutions that prepare people for business careers. The connections are specific and durable enough to be part of the portrait.

“Conducting business ethically is key to our success.”

Gene Lowe · SPX Code of Ethics and Business Conduct

A life beyond the equipment

Lowe lives in Charlotte with his wife, Sehnaz, and their two children. His listed interests include tennis, skiing, World Cup soccer matches, and Virginia Tech football. The Hokie connection survives the MBA, the board appointments, and the chief executive’s schedule. An undergraduate affiliation can prove remarkably resistant to everything that happens after graduation.

His public comments also make room for the people doing the operating work. Celebrating the first shipment from Madison, he congratulated the cooling team. When sharing news of the Marley OlympusMAX product, he expressed pride in the team that launched it. These are small observations rather than a complete account of his personality, but they show what he chooses to acknowledge in public: a product reaches a customer because people have made it happen.

The company’s direction gives him plenty left to do. More cooling capacity must become reliable production. Purchased capabilities must find customers across a broader organization. Controls and mechanical equipment must work together as useful systems. None of those tasks is completed by adopting a new name or announcing a transaction, however helpful those milestones may be.

Lowe’s career has brought him back to cooling with a larger remit and a different level of demand. That circular route is the appealing part of the story. The executive confronting an expanding market has already spent years inside the kind of business now being asked to expand. Somewhere between the boardroom and the loading dock, the strategy meets its test. The next unit has to ship.