BitFury Eyes Bitcoin Mining Advantage With Immersion Cooling Acquisition

BitFury Group has signed an agreement to acquire Allied Control, a Hong Kong-based tech startup that provides cooling systems for supercomputing and data center applications.

The move will make Allied Control a subsidiary and in-house special department of the bitcoin mining and transaction processing company. The deal has not yet been closed and is subject to customary conditions.

Allied specializes in two-phase immersion thermal management platforms – a technology that could perhaps match the power and energy challenges posed by large-scale bitcoin mining operations.

BitFury

told CoinDesk that the acquisition will make operations faster, more efficient and better able to deploy in scale, while providing the opportunity to enter a new market and eliminating a dependency.

It also means fewer capital expenditures, the company asserted, including almost no operational expenditures on maintenance.

Allied Control VP of operations Kar-Wing Lau said that BitFury is the “perfect match” for his company’s “disruptive” capabilities.

Lau added:

BitFury said that in acquiring an experienced team and innovative technology, it will become strongly positioned to lead in its market.

The move follows a banner year, in which BitFury dominated VC funding in the bitcoin mining sector, raising $40m in two funding rounds.

Last month

CEO Valery Vavilov told CoinDesk that while the company is focused on bitcoin at present, it is a technology company more broadly that wants to move toward supercomputing.

Following the news of the acquisition of Allied, he said it will be better positioned to enter the high-performance computing (HPC) market.

“Our big scale production will get AC immersion cooling technology up to a new level,” said Vavilov. “Together, we hope to get leading positions on solutions for the HPC market.”

The IT infrastructure market was worth about $140bn in 2014, he explained; the HPC industry, $12bn.

In China, he added, the HPC industry has a compound annual growth rate of about 30% with increasing demand for HPC solutions from governments as well as corporations using big data analysis to improve productivity.

“It’s a very attractive high margin industry, which BitFury and Allied Control plan to revolutionize together,” he said.

Images via BitFury