Every mining unit is looking for competitive advantages over their counterparts, and more miners than ever think immersion is an answer.

Immersion mining — or mining with immersion cooling systems — is the practice of submerging bitcoin mining equipment in dielectric fluids — either oils or engineered fluids — with the goals of managing heat exhaust, limiting noise, increasing production and more. The process of building and submerging a mining machine in an immersion cooling system is self-evidently more complex than setting the same machine on a rack with good air circulation. But the core function is cooling hash boards as the fluid that runs over them is circulated, piped in and then out of the tank.

Immersion cooling systems are not a new technology.

Riot Blockchain, one of the largest public miners, announced a massive 1 gigawatt mining facility planned for Navarro County, Texas that includes at least four buildings dedicated to immersion mining in addition to the immersion-cooled systems that the company already operates at its Whinstone, Texas facility. CleanSpark also announced its plans for a 20 megawatt (MW) immersion-cooled facility in Norcross, Georgia. And Argo Blockchain plans to deploy 200 MW worth of immersion-cooled mining hardware, per public filings.

Not every large, public mining company needs to build immersion-cooled facilities though. In fact, some facilities don’t even need an air-cooling system. In some Bitfarms-owned mining farms operating in Quebec, for example, the outside air is so cold due to the local climate that it naturally counteracts the heat exhaust from the mining machines.

Core Scientific’s CEO said that, for immersion setups, efficiency is increasing, and costs are dropping. “It’s a lot less expensive to build an immersion facility than it was a few years ago,” he told the audience.

Immersion is also popular with small-scale, at-home miners that are installing a wide range of immersion systems, from professionally-fabricated units to do-it-yourself experimental projects.

Liquid cooling offers improved heat dissipation, making the absorption and removal of heat much more rapid compared to air cooling. With improved heat control, machines can also be more safely overclocked, meaning the machines are hashing at higher-than-normal levels, which leads to greater revenue earned. Efficiency also improves with immersion thanks to removing the fan, which accounts for nearly 5% of the machine’s total energy consumption. Without the fan, this energy can be spent on hashing instead.

Immersion miners need finances for all the same components as air-cooled sites while also filling a list of additional and often costly components, including tanks and frames, pumps, heat exchangers, sensors and control systems, and dielectric coolant.

Air-cooled farms won’t be rendered obsolete, but a future where the majority of Bitcoin’s hash rate comes from immersed hardware could be closer than anyone expects.