They're both important.
Time to market because of the crazy high diff change (more profit per GH/s when you deploy sooner rather than later).
Immersion cooling because of the electricity and space savings (which can also be mitigated by moving to places where electricity is cheap and space is not an issue but AM's datacenter space is limited and its electricity costs are not the lowest).
My Chinese friend rent some hydropower station for mining , better than expensive immersion cooling
Immersion cooling is cheaper, that's the point of it.
A little bit of fluid in a bathtub with bare mining boards costs less than cases, heatsinks, fans, shelves, cables, screws, nuts, bolts, thermal grease, house, all that and people to put it all together. You only need 200cc to cool 4kW.
If you have 1MW power and spend X kW on cooling that's X kW more mining gear you can deploy if you use immersion. No matter if you use hydro or burn coal for your power it's unrelated. Power is valuable.
And it saves possibly hundreds of board developers time to develop/test/source/buy/produce/ship all that. Miners are reduced to chips on boards, that's it.
Boards can be made smaller and have more chips on them because now there are no thermal issues.
All that in a shipping container instead of a complete building. If the IRS comes after you, you take your container and move ;-)
When new chips (28nm) come along, you throw away the old ones and stick the new ones in.
The boards make more Bitcoins because they run faster (performance increase).
The boards make more Bitcoins because they some online weeks earlier (board developers can focus on board and chips and get them out ASAP instead of doing all the thermal and other design and start looking for parts).
Unless you like Ikea shelves of course and/or you just deploy a few TH.
http://www.immersion-cooling.com/publications/Analysis_of_Large-Scale_Bitcoin_Mining_Operations.pdfExample 2.4PH 1.2MW Mining Container (ASICMiner Gen3):
● 6 tanks per container, 200kW-240kW each
● 400 boards each tank, 500W per board, 2,400 boards total
● Equivalent to 600 4U boxes
● Shipping container footprint instead of 60 racks in high density facility
● 2-3PH/s at estimated hashrate (based on reports from China )
● No thermal throttling, possible performance increase
● Fixed and predictable cost, no matter if fully or only partially populated