BitFury’s Allied Control Receives Green Innovation Award

Bitfury’s Allied Control, a company that uses two-phase immersion thermal management for high-performance computing and data centers, received the Green Innovations Award for its potential in saving electricity and “billions of gallons of water” in the future.

Allied Control was recognized by the head of the Hong Kong government for its energy-efficient two-phase immersion cooling system, which submerges electronic components in dielectric heat transfer liquids (better heat conductors than air, water or oil). The liquids vaporized from the chips are condensed and reused.

According to a report, the U.S National Security Agency’s major data center in Utah “consumes up to 6.6 million gallons of water a month.” Apart from the water used to cool the data center, it also embeds water in electricity generation which consumes 1.8 liters of water per kilowatt-hour in the United States.

Allied Control’s third-generation immersion cooling system saves around 99 percent of electricity used for cooling not just in cold regions, but hot and humid parts in Asia, without wasting water or oil. This advantage allows data centers and chip manufacturers to expand their services into countries with cheap power costs and existing infrastructure, such as the Philippines or Vietnam.

In January 2015, Bitfury acquired Allied Contol for the same reason, with a global vision to expand throughout Asia into countries with low power costs for manufacturing chips for bitcoin mining.

“This acquisition will enable us to substantially increase energy efficiency of our data centers and speed up deployment of our new ASIC chip allowing to lower overall capital expenditure,” BitFury CEO Valery Vavilov said. “In addition, it provides an opportunity for us to enter new markets such as HPC, using the experience of the Allied Control team. The use of immersion cooling will provide BitFury with flexibility when choosing locations for our data centers.”

Help Datacenters in Locations like California

Suffering from the same problem as the massive data center in Utah, several major technology companies have moved their data centers from California to other colder states due to high energy and water consumption. However, with the two-phase immersion cooling system, tech giants have the opportunity to move to regions such as California, where infrastructures are pre-set-up and most tech talents are based.

“With California being in its fourth consecutive drought year and regulators proposing mandatory reduction of up to 35 percent in urban water consumption, Allied Control’s immersion cooling technology might offer an effective solution to cool down the many data centers serving the hungry and ever-growing demand of cloud services and other Silicon Valley applications,” said Kar-Wing Lau, vice president of operations at Allied Control, in a press release. “In our standard configuration, the closed-loop cooling units do not use evaporative water towers, and as a result, the water usage effectiveness is close to zero (WUE <0.003 L/kWh).

“Our proprietary technology is highly energy efficient,” added Vavilov. “We are committed to growing our transaction processing infrastructure with the smallest carbon footprint, continuing to rely solely on renewable energy sources.”