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Kaboomracks' Brian Snyder on Micro-Channel ASIC Cooling
From Phoenix office leases to a Force Physics micro-channel array: Brian Snyder's history of mining hardware and heat at Mining Disrupt Miami 2023.
Count the breakers. That was how Brian Snyder sized up a mining site in Phoenix in the early days. He and his team toured office space with power included in the lease, opened the breaker panel with the agent watching, and worked out how many miners would fit. It lasted two or three months each time, until the landlord kicked them out.
Snyder is CEO of Kaboomracks. He told that story at Mining Disrupt Miami, held July 25 to 27, 2023. Bitcoin traded at $29,144 that week. On October 17, 2026 it traded at $81,466.
His talk traced mining from laptops to ASICs. He started in 2012, near the end of the GPU era. Then data centers became the easy option: no build-out, power at around 20 cents a kilowatt hour. The problem was heat. In his words, "we would actually overheat data centers." His team built rack-mount shelving for early ASICs in cheap-power data centers in Washington, and later purpose-built sites designed around airflow.
On containers, he had a warning about the electrical code. The Bitmain container he discussed meets the 2017 code, he said, but in most states outside Texas and Minnesota operators need the 2020 code. Kaboomracks sells a kit for that. As he put it, "we've got a kit and solution and a pathway for you to take that cheap N5 that you bought and get it up into 2020 compliance."
Then he turned to cooling. Two-phase immersion from Bitfury, hydro cooling from Bitmain and MicroBT, and single-phase immersion all work, he said, but they cost a lot of capital and take expertise to run. Chips keep getting smaller and denser, so cooling matters more.
His announcement was a partnership with a company called Force Physics, which makes a micro-channel array. A large traditional heatsink, he said, handles about 1.9 watts per square centimeter. The array, in his words, can do "close to 31 watts per centimeter squared." He called that almost twenty times the cooling potential of traditional technology.
Kaboomracks had fitted an ASIC with the array and run it in Phoenix, Arizona. He said the temperature there reached 126 degrees while the chips held stable at 78 degrees Celsius. The machine was on the company's booth for anyone who wanted to see it.
The full story is on Mining Disrupt at miningdisrupt dot com, and many more like it play around the clock on Bitcoin Radio.