BitFury Buys Cooling Tech Firm

When it comes to mining, cooling down the mining hardware is one of the most important factors in improving efficiency and hash rates. As mining difficulty increases, temperature is more and more important, which is why some mining farms have been moved to arctic locations to deal with increasing heat.

Why Allied Control?

BitFury wants to acquire Allied Control’s advanced cooling tech. It’s called passive two-phase immersion, and it’s a very fast way to bring temperatures down, steadily and continuously, in a computer.

Hot processing chips are bathed in a cool fluid, and as the chip heats up, the resulting vapour rises to the top of the unit. A coil condenser cools the vapour rapidly, causing it to condense and drip back into the tank below, and the cycle continues.

The fluids used are designed for excellent heat conductivity – much better than air or water – and boil at 49 degrees Celsius. This is the key to accelerating the cooling cycle, ensuring the chips cannot heat up. In fact, the makers say that it’s 4,000 times more efficient than using fans.

Naturally, this system is very portable. It means BitFury could set up data centres practically anywhere in the world, so it’s not limited to natural cooling in exceptionally cold climates. That means it can shop around for the best price for data centre facilities, potentially bringing costs down in other areas. Allied Control says that the system is also environmentally friendly, and the fluids used do not pose a fire risk.

Bitcoin and Beyond

BitFury is one of bitcoin mining’s success stories. It has raised $40 million in its last two funding rounds. However, the purchase of Allied Control suggests that it will take its business beyond bitcoin mining and into high performance computing. This potentially opens up their services to governments and enterprise clients, and it will allow BitFury to capitalise on the need for massive amounts of processing power to handle big data analysis and cleansing.

The CEO of BitFury, Valery Vavilov, has said in the past that bitcoin offers huge opportunities. It’s therefore unlikely that BitFury will completely step out of the cryptocurrency space and into other areas. However, BitFury does seem to be looking for new ways to innovate and maintain income streams, beyond just developing faster, more efficient ASIC chips.

Not only is Allied Control’s technology potentially advantageous for BitFury, it will also help it to gain a green reputation in an industry that practically siphons electricity from the grid.