ECL unveils first customer for off-grid hydrogen powered data centre

ECL unveils first customer for off-grid hydrogen powered data centre

Dean Nelson interview.jpg

Data centre- as-a-service operator ECL has announced the delivery of the world’s first data centre that uses hydrogen as its primary power source.

The new facility, named MV1, is located in Mountain View, California and is designed from the ground up to support the high densities of GPUs that are the backbone of AI infrastructure.

The facility achieves a power usage efficiency (PUE) of 1.1 and supports high-density deployments of up to 75kw per rack.

Sustainable bare metal cloud provider Cato Digital has been named as the first customer of ECL.

Cato provides dedicated GPU server rental to platform partners, enterprises and retail users that are ideal for inference engines, generative AI, and continuous training of small language models.

It is providing NVIDIA DGX hardware configured at the highest density possible to fully utilize the ECL design at MV1.

“The rapid expansion of AI has put incredible strain on global data center power capacity,” said Dean Nelson, the CEO of Cato Digital and the founder of the iMason’s.

Cato Digital and ECL are also both founding members of iMason’s climate accord, an industry body of over 260 companies representing a combined market cap of US$6 trillion that have united on decarbonising digital infrastructure.

“We have to rethink how to deploy dense compute to serve this unprecedented growth,” Nelson continues.

“ECL is uniquely positioned as they have redesigned the data center from the ground up. It is setting a new standard for excellence in the design, development, and delivery of hydrogen-powered data centers today, not years from now,” he says.

Yuval Bachar, Founder and CEO of ECL explained that 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.

“The significant upfront cost associated with re-engineering existing facilities and transitioning to hydrogen fuel cells makes the transition prohibitive for most data centre operators,” Bachar says.

Bachard claims that 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.

“We can't wait to see what our customers will do with the ability to accelerate into the future that ECL provides," he adds.

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