Oil Cooled Servers?

Wired says Intel has been looking at the technology for a while:

You want to know a fast way to cool down a computer? Dunk it in a big tank of mineral oil.
That’s a technique that Intel has been testing out over the past year, running servers in little oil-filled boxes built by an Austin, Texas, company called Green Revolution Cooling. As Gigaom reported on Friday, it turns out that once you take out the PC’s fans and seal up the hard drives, oil-cooling a server works out pretty well.
In its tests, Green Revolution’s CarnotJet cooling system used a lot less energy than their air-cooled counterparts, Dr. Mike Patterson, a power and thermal engineer with Intel, tells Wired. Intel found that oil-cooled systems only needed another 2 or 3 percent of their power for cooling. That’s far less than your typical server, which has a 50 or 60 percent overhead. The world’s most efficient data centers — those run by Google or Facebook, for example — can get that number down to 10 or 20 percent.
Intel’s research is part of a much larger effort to significantly reduce power consumption in the data center. Power is one of the most costly aspects of data center operation, particularly if you’re running the sort of massive computing facilities that underpin web services as popular as Google or Facebook.
Although it’s still considered a cutting-edge technology, Green Revolution Cooling hopes to have a big effect on data centers. As Green Revolution’s director of marketing David Banys sees it, an oil-cooled data center could be set up just about anywhere, cheaply. “There’s no need for chillers; there’s no need for raised floors,” he says. “You can put our servers in a barn that’s 110 degrees.”

Air cooling servers, then having giant cooling systems for the server farms never made much sense to me.