ECL has delivered the “world’s first” data centre using hydrogen as its primary source of power and has announced backing of $10m from Hyperwise Ventures.
The data centre-as-a-service pioneer uses hydrogen as a power source at its US facility in Mountain View, California, MV1, and will utilise the funding to accelerate its R&D and expand the company’s footprint.
ECL’s sustainable data centres support high densities of GPUs that are the backbone of AI infrastructure, with PUE of 1.1 and high-density deployments of up to 75kW per rack. They have been designed encompass AI technology and be built and operated off-grid by any company needing scalable data centre capacity
The solutions cooling innovations, including utilisation of water created from hydrogen power generation and proprietary rear door heat exchanger technology, eliminate reliance on local resources. The system is modular too, allowing customers to expand them as needed in 1MW increments.
It also boasts the lowest cost of ownership (TCO) in the industry and fastest time-to-market, with effective flexibility in terms of location, size and density.
Cato Digital will be ECL’s first customer, which provides dedicated GPU server rental to platform partners, enterprises and retail users that are ideal for interface engines, generative AI and continuous training of small language models.
“The rapid expansion of AI has put incredible strain on global data centre power capacity,” explained Cato Digital’s Dean Nelson. “Building more of today’s current data centres won’t solve it.
“ECL is uniquely positioned as they have redesigned the data centre from the ground up. It is setting a new standard for excellence in the design, deployment and delivery of hydrogen-powered data centres today, not years from now.”
Yuval Bachar, Founder and CEO of ECL, added, “Many data centre providers have identified hydrogen as the power source of choice for the future of the data centre due to its exceptional safety record, improved efficiency and reliability, sustainability, and recent technological advancements.
“ECL has broken the mould, embracing not only hydrogen but the opportunity to support the ever-increasing space, power, and cooling demands of the AI industry in the race to realise all of its projected benefits.”
