Can immersion cooling be implemented progressively? What does a phased deployment look like?

Keep your capital investment to a minimum by leveraging your existing cooling infrastructure, whatever it looks like at the moment.

For example, considering the following steps could be useful for you:

• Implement Air Assisted Immersion Cooling (AAIC) to take advantage of your air cooling infrastructure, with no need for a water loop. Not the most energy efficient implementation, but probably the easiest one.
• Connect the immersion system to your existing chilled water loop by adding some pipework
• Connect the immersion system to the return of your existing chilled water loop
• Consider replacing your chillers with dry coolers in order to take advantage of the higher operation temperatures of immersion cooling