Crypto Miner Bitfury Is Using Magic Baths to Keep Machines Cool

Cryptocurrency miners have tried just about everything to keep their super-fast machines cool. They’ve moved them to Siberia and submerged them in vats of oil. One startup buried its mining rigs in a chilly Soviet-era bunker beneath the Eurasian steppe.

But even by crypto industry standards, the 40 megawatt plant Bitfury built in Georgia’s capital of Tbilisi is exotic. It submerges the computers in a non-conductive liquid to keep them chilled as they make millions of calculations a second. Bitfury said in February that it sold the plant to a Hong Kong-listed fintech company backed by a Chinese shadow banker in a deal that was conceived on Richard Branson’s private Caribbean resort, then bought it back at a discount.