Bitcoin miners embrace liquid immersion cooling

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Overclockers first explored liquid immersion cooling in the early 2000s, and some server manufacturers adopted it for data centers. Now, Bitcoin miners are turning to immersion cooling systems because they promise to eliminate overheating cryptocurrency mining machines and maximize their income.

“Underwater equipment operates faster without overheating,” said Nishant Sharma, founder of mining consultant BlocksBridge, in an interview with Bloomberg. “It looks like an aquarium with machines inside. Sooner or later all the big miners will be doing large-scale immersion mining.”

For example, Riot Blockchain, a cryptocurrency miner from Texas listed on the Nasdaq, recently announced plans to develop the first large-scale immersion-cooled Bitcoin mining facility with 46,000 mining machines. The installation will consume an enormous power of 20 megawatts. Meanwhile, some miners used liquid immersion cooling in 2018.

Large Bitcoin mining farms are like data centers. Both use expensive machine loads that compute numbers 24/7 (only data centers process payload); both need to cool these machines; both strive to maximize computational density; and both often have space constraints.

However, there are several important differences. Data centers are located in special facilities designed for air or liquid cooling (two methods that require significant cooling equipment). In contrast, mining farms are located in industrial facilities or abandoned warehouses. Data center operators are concerned with things like total cost of ownership (TCO), so they tend to choose technologies that offer the right mix of features and qualities to control their TCO. In contrast, since 80% of a miner’s operating costs are electricity bills, cryptocurrency miners are primarily concerned with performance and a stable power supply rather than total cost of ownership.

Nowadays, many cryptocurrency farms use immersion cooling systems to lower the temperatures of their mining machines, maximize their performance, and increase revenue per machine (which is quite expensive). Immersion cooling cools all components of a system and does not require large and complex equipment like industrial air conditioners or liquid cooling systems. However, that doesn’t mean that immersion cooling is easy (or cheap) to deploy or maintain. Meanwhile, the use of immersion cooling allows for the installation of additional mining machines in the same building to maximize their performance, two factors that outweigh any possible drawbacks of this method for cryptominers.

Immersion cooling has been around and has evolved for years, so there is a plethora of non-conductive equipment and liquids to choose from, depending on whether you are dealing with a single-phase or two-phase immersion cooling method. Therefore, miners will not have any technological problems to deploy immersion cooling systems. What remains to be seen is how the volatility of cryptocurrencies affects the willingness of cryptomining companies to invest huge sums of money in hardware while ignoring common practices set by traditional data centers.

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