Data center operators are increasingly looking for alternative energy sources to meet their processing needs, which are growing exponentially with the advent of artificial intelligence.
Colocation provider ECL believes it has found this solution in a hydrogen-powered data center that does not draw electricity from the grid, generates water, and has a PUE of 1.1.
The company MV1 system Based in Mountain View, California, it is the prototype for a series of sustainable, modular and custom-built data centers that the company designed from the ground up to support high-density GPU deployments of up to 75 kW per rack.
ECL claims it can deploy new facilities in less than 12 months, rather than the typical two- to three-year process that requires building a traditional data center.
MV1 is a one-megawatt design, but fully modularso that more capacity can be added as needed, said Yuval Bachar, the company’s founder and CEO, who previously held senior engineering, infrastructure and architecture positions at Microsoft, LinkedIn, Facebook and Cisco.
The facility is relatively modest for a data center, but Bachar said the modular, hydrogen-powered data center concept was designed with scalability in mind.
“We are 100% tuning the technology to the size we want,” he said. “And we already have several larger projects in the pipeline that are much larger and that will scale up many times the units we have.”
Hydrogen-powered data centers are not a new concept, but they have yet to gain traction in the industry. According to AFCOM’s State of the Data Center 2024 survey, only 16% of respondents believe hydrogen-powered data centers will gain traction – while 59% believe solar energy will gain traction and 28% believe wind energy will gain traction. ECL hopes to change that.
“An emission-free location”
ECL’s first customer, bare-metal GPU provider Cato Digital, has purchased the entire capacity of the MV1 facility. Initially, 84 Nvidia DGX servers will be installed and another 44 will be added later, for a total of 1,800 GPUs running AI-as-a-service operations.
Bachar points out that the average cost to build a one-megawatt data center is between $14 million and $15 million. hydrogen-powered data center is about 30 to 40 percent less. The operating costs of these plants are much lower because they use hydrogen energy instead of the local power grid, he said.
Although hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, it is not free. Regular deliveries of hydrogen are needed to power the data center, but according to Bachar, this hydrogen is 50 percent cheaper than the same amount of diesel fuel.
“It’s definitely cheaper than just running on diesel generators. But it’s also environmentally friendly, so you get a lot more than just the running costs. It’s actually a completely sustainable site with no emissions,” he said.
The Fusina hydrogen power plant near Venice, Italy (Image: Alamy)
As long as a regular source of hydrogen is available, an ECL data center can be located anywhere. And instead of consuming vast amounts of water like most data centers, the MV1 plant actually generates water in the power generation process, which ECL returns to the local water supply.
According to Bachar, ECL owns about 20 patents for power distribution, power collection and cooling. The operator uses its own custom cooling technology, which includes heat exchangers at the back door. With version 2.0 of its cooling technology, the company aims to bring the racks up to a cooling capacity of 125 kW. This is planned for the second or third quarter of next year.
Analysts comment
Jabari Williams-George, senior research analyst at the Uptime Institute, says: “(ECL) achieves what most people dream of: the ability to source electricity locally to produce hydrogen and also generate cold and hot water.”
Other industry analysts, however, are not entirely convinced about hydrogen as an energy source. They point out that this technology has been around for decades but has not yet become widespread.
“The industry has been talking about hydrogen fuel cells for 40 to 50 years,” said Jack Gold, senior analyst at J.Gold Associates. “I remember sitting in a meeting with (a major technology company) 25 years ago and they told us the next generation of laptops would be hydrogen powered because you don’t have to worry about charging (the devices). That never happened.”
Ashish Nadkari, an analyst at IDC, added: “The way I see it, the biggest concern is, first, how reliable is the hydrogen supply, and second, how much hydrogen do they need to keep the lights on? Are they going to run out of hydrogen every day? Do they need to refuel every day, two days, three days?”
Despite all the skepticism, it is clear that data centers must develop new solutions to address today’s energy constraints, especially given the increasing demands of AI. ECL plans to launch new hydrogen-powered data centers in the coming months.
