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The Forklift Cooler: Midas ASICE 3.0
Darren Burgess of Midas Immersion Cooling on a company that began as a data center, and what changed in its ASICE 3.0 tank system.
Midas Immersion Cooling has been around longer than many people realize. That was the opening admission from Darren Burgess, the company's Vice President of Business Development, at Mining Disrupt Miami, held June 24 through 26, 2024. Midas, he said, is one of the OGs of immersion cooling, and it may have been forgotten along the way while it quietly built its business. The company did not start as a vendor.
It started in Austin in 2010 as the first commercial immersion cooling data center, buying its equipment from the only supplier that existed at the time. Midas ran that data center, worked with the gear itself, and kept improving it until the cooling tank design was patentable. Around 2018, when Bitcoin mining in the United States took off, the patented tank found its market. Burgess gave three reasons to work with Midas.
The first is experience. The installed base is now more than 500 megawatts, which he described as tank after tank, pipe after pipe, cooler after cooler, across more than 4,000 tanks mining Bitcoin right now. The second reason is engineering. Every system is engineered in house, and Midas will adjust the fit, lid or tank height to suit a customer's technicians.
The third is support, from design through installation to operation, because immersion is a lot of water, oil and plumbing that has to come together. The rest of the talk was the ASICE 3.0 system. Burgess said capital cost has come down to some of the most competitive numbers for large deployments. Density is up: a megawatt now fits in about 450 square feet, including the aisles and the power distribution.
Installation is turnkey. The tank, heat exchanger, pump and piping arrive as one package that goes on a forklift, gets dropped in place and is connected to the water plumbing. On performance, the coolers stay dry up to 92 and a half degrees Fahrenheit. Above that, the system adds a bit of water in adiabatic mode and still delivers the tank's full 150 kilowatts up to about a hundred and seven degrees.
Maintenance was simplified too, with easier access to the pump and heat exchanger. Burgess said unmanned operation for a couple of months or more is now possible with an immersion cooling data center, and that the savings in technicians and minor maintenance help recover the up-front cost. He finished with a note that the equipment is made in the United States and an invitation to booth 70. The full story is on Mining Disrupt at miningdisrupt dot com, and many more like it play around the clock on Bitcoin Radio.