Can anyone tell me more about this immersion cooling? Would they be individual cooling units that anyone could use to cool down any ASIC? Are there any risks of damaging your machine? How much money could these units save someone who is mining?
The precise details are still to come, but the basic idea behind immersion cooling is that air is a terrible heat conductor, which means that you need fans spinning rapidly to pump as much air past the heatsinks/chips in order to keep it cool. Those fans use power (and generate noise, which is less important in a datacenter) of their own and in a datacenter there's enough heat being generated that the ambient air in the room needs to be cooled as well, requiring AC units, which add to the power usage.
With immersion cooling, you can immerse all machines in one giant container of oil, which has been selected to have low viscosity (= easy to pump around) and high thermal conductivity (= takes up a lot of heat). Unlike air, you can actually finetune the properties of the oil. The oil is then pumped around and can, in theory, simply be cooled in the outside air, provided you have a big enough heatsink.
If set up properly, immersion cooling is more efficient than simple air cooling. The hardware is less accessible, so for a datacenter where hardware is regularly replaced or added, it's not so ideal. But a mining farm is pretty much set-and-forget.
