Darren Burgess, Vice President of Business Development at Midas Immersion Cooling, opened his session at Mining Disrupt Miami, held June 24–26, 2024, with an admission. Midas, he said, belongs among the OGs of immersion cooling, but it may have gotten forgotten along the way while it quietly made its way for quite a few years. So he used his time for a reintroduction: where the company came from, why he thinks miners should work with it, and what changed in its ASICE 3.0 system.
The talk was recorded when Bitcoin traded at $61,272. As of October 16, 2026, the price is $82,531. The numbers Burgess put on the table were about tanks, square footage and water temperature rather than the coin, and those are the ones this story keeps.
From Data Center Operator to Equipment Patent Holder
Burgess started with the timeline. Midas did not begin as a vendor. It began in Austin as a data center, and it bought its first immersion cooling equipment from the only supplier that existed at the time. The company's experience, he said, comes from running an immersion cooling data center and working with the equipment itself from the beginning.
in Austin all the way back in 2010 Midas actually started as the first commercial immersion cooling data center
Darren Burgess · 0:52
What Midas did with that equipment was iterate on it, slowly improving it so it cooled more efficiently and cooled better. Burgess said the company iterated so much that it was able to patent the cooling tank technology, and he described the current solution as fully patented. The commercial turn came around 2018. That was when U.S. Bitcoin mining started to take off, and Midas, in his words, got some great traction with the patented design.
The 500 Megawatt Proof of Concept
The first of Burgess's three reasons to work with Midas was experience, and he put a number on it. The installed base now stands at more than 500 megawatts. A photo on the lower right of his slide showed 100 megawatts being laid out, something about the size of a football field. Anyone who watches YouTube or gets LinkedIn updates from a certain large mining company, he said, might recognize the picture.
With that we now have more than 500 megawatts of installed base
Darren Burgess · 1:56
He called 500 megawatts unparalleled experience: tank after tank, pipe after pipe, cooler after cooler, across more than 4,000 tanks currently out there mining Bitcoin. The second reason was engineering. All Midas systems are engineered internally, and Burgess said the company can customize a tank for the right size deployment and the right customer, whether that means a particular fit, a certain type of lid, or a certain height that a customer's technicians are used to for maintenance. He said Midas has done this for its largest customers.
The third reason was support, which he traced from design through installation to operation. Installation, he said, is where it's all at, particularly for anyone who has worked with direct chip cooling or immersion. Everything has to be laid out and plumbed correctly for the system to work its best. He compared the result to a laptop that you switch on and it simply goes, and noted that very few things are like that. An immersion site is a lot of water, a lot of oil and a lot of plumbing that has to come together to get the heat out. Midas, he said, takes pride in being a partner through that process rather than handing the equipment over and wishing the customer good luck.
Fitting a Megawatt into 450 Square Feet
The rest of the session covered the ASICE 3.0 and what improved. Burgess listed the points he wanted the room to leave with: lower cost, higher density, turnkey installation, somewhat higher performance, ease of usability, and equipment made in the United States of America. On cost, he said that as Midas improved its vendors, its relationships and its supply chain, it reached some of the most competitive capital expense for large-scale deployments, and he offered to talk numbers with anyone who stopped by booth 70.
we can put a megawatt in about 450 square feet now and That's including the aisles and the power distribution
Darren Burgess · 5:45
The density figure was his answer to the question of what higher density actually means. The 450 square feet includes the aisles and the power distribution, not just the tanks. The point, he said, is to bring the tanks tightly together to make the most of a customer's potential building space.
The Turnkey Forklift Delivery
Turnkey installation came out of Midas's most recent large deployments. Burgess said customers really like, and ultimately kind of force, the company to bring the best system together as a single package.
Everything tank heat exchanger pump piping Comes as one package and Can be put on a forklift dropped in a spot
Darren Burgess · 6:20
Once the unit is in its spot, it is connected to the water plumbing. That, he said, is what Midas means by turnkey: fully assembled. On performance, he described the work as a balance between the flow rates in the tank, the temperature of the oil, the potential temperature of the incoming water, the size of the pump and the size of the cooler.
We can actually keep those coolers dry up to 92 and a half degrees Fahrenheit Beyond that go into adiabatic mode
Darren Burgess · 6:52
Past that point, a bit of water is added in adiabatic mode, and Burgess said the system continues to deliver 100 percent of the tank's cooling capacity, meaning 150 kilowatts, to roughly a hundred and seven degrees Fahrenheit. He framed it as marrying the oil and the water so that unnecessary amounts of water are not required while the tanks still deliver their full output.
Engineering for Unmanned Months
Ease of usability was the point Burgess called huge for immersion. Tank heights, lids, reaching the pump underneath, reaching the heat exchanger for service: he said Midas worked through all of it in the 3.0 version to greatly simplify mechanical and minor maintenance, so that an operator can run as efficiently as possible.
Literally unmanned operations to the extent of a couple of months and more are now possible with an immersion cooling data center
Darren Burgess · 8:08
That claim, which he noted may have come up in an earlier talk that day, is what ties the maintenance work to the money. A site that runs unmanned for a couple of months only needs someone to go by and check from time to time. Burgess acknowledged that a lot of people say immersion cooling costs so much up front, but argued that when there is not a lot of minor maintenance down the road, and not a lot of technicians who need to be there live keeping watch, some of that capital expense can be recovered in operational expense.
He closed by inviting the room to challenge Midas on on-time delivery, repeating that the equipment is made in the United States of America and that the company can deploy in rapid fashion. Then he thanked the organizers and pointed people to booth 70, where the Midas team would be for the rest of the day to talk about the technology and about what each miner needed.