[chha]

No intimate knowledge of this, but as with anything it's the economics that will decide if this is the next big thing or not. James Hamilton did a writeup on the economics of running a datacenter a few years back[1], and concluded that approximately 1/3 of the montly expenses are for power, distribution and cooling.

If immersive cooling doesn't significantly reduce the lifetime of components and doesn't add costs (additional mops?) enough to offset the reduction, there is no reason why it shouldn't be useful for most datacenters. Intel was working on this a few years back [2], and as far as I can tell the Cray 2 used immersive cooling for some components in the mid-80s.

[1] - http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2010/09/overall-data-center... [2] - https://www.technologyreview.com/s/429179/intel-servers-take...