Tomasz Buk – From Cool Tech to Hot Value: Heat Reuse in Immersion-Cooled Bitcoin Mining

What if your Bitcoin miner could heat your home, your swimming pool, or even an entire village — while still stacking sats? At BTC Prague, I made the case that heat reuse in immersion-cooled mining is one of the most underrated opportunities in the industry today.

The Energy Is Already There

Here’s a number that should stop you in your tracks: nearly 80% of electric energy generated by power plants goes toward heating — homes, schools, public buildings, swimming pools. Every single percent you can cut from that figure translates into gigawatt-hours saved and tons of CO2 avoided. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a real impact.

And the good news? We don’t need to build more nuclear plants to meet rising demand. The energy is already in the system — excess power from photovoltaics, wind, and other renewables. We just need to arrange things smarter around what we already have.

A Blockchain Heat Pump

At DCX, we specialize in liquid cooling and immersion cooling for data centers and crypto mining farms. The way I like to describe our systems is simple: they act as a blockchain heat pump. You get all the benefits of a heat pump — warm water, heated floors, pool heating — but unlike a regular heat pump, ours also generates crypto on the side. No heat pump in the world does that.

At small scale, you can connect an immersion tank to your home boiler and get 50°C hot water around the clock, because miners never stop running. You can heat your floor, your pool, or even use it for snowmelting systems — very popular in Norway, Sweden, and Canada. At larger scale, we’re talking district heating, hotels, spa resorts, ski chalets in the Alps. The use cases are almost endless.

Regulations Are Coming — Be Ready

In the EU, this is no longer just a nice-to-have. In Germany, any installation above 0.5 megawatt already requires you to justify why you’re not reusing heat. And 0.5 MW for a crypto mining setup is roughly 100 miners — something you could fit in a garage. This regulation is only going to tighten, and countries like the Netherlands and Singapore are heading the same direction toward 100% heat rejection requirements.

Crypto mining actually has a story to be proud of here. Most of the biggest farms in the world run on renewables — not because regulators forced them, but because miners chased lower electricity prices. Traditional data centers are only now catching up, pushed by rules they can no longer ignore.

Real Projects, Real Scale

One of my favorite examples is a 1 megawatt installation heating an entire village in Finland. Another is a crypto mining farm in the basement of a Chicago skyscraper, heating the whole building and using the Chicago River as a cooling reservoir. We’re currently involved in building the largest AI data center in the world, plus three others in the global top ten — hundreds of megawatts combined.

Our immersion tanks and hydro cooling solutions are deployed in more than 70 countries. We offer end-to-end support: hardware, fluids, installation, maintenance training, and full container builds from 10-foot to 40-foot, ranging from 100 kW to over 2 MW. Everything is manufactured in Poland — so if you’re in Czech Republic, Slovakia, Germany, or Ukraine, we’re practically your neighbors.

Let’s Build Something Together

If you’re working with heat pumps, building mining farms, or running installations for customers, I’d love to explore a partnership. The opportunity to combine photovoltaics, immersion cooling, and heat reuse into one system is real, proven, and growing fast. Don’t let the heat go to waste.