Investors, developers and clients want more data centres, but access to power stops many projects in their tracks. Grids in many key markets are creaking, and data centre operators are often convenient scapegoats for local authorities and community groups – in some cases leading to bans on data centres drawing any grid power at all.
One way round power problems is to remove the grid from the equation entirely. This is what ECL did for the MV1 project, committing to a fully autonomous power model based on hydrogen fuel cells designed in‑house. The site is the first in the world to run entirely on hydrogen power, using hydrogen fuel cells of the company’s own design.
Production-grade AI - running entirely on hydrogen power
The facility is operating under real production AI demand, with multiple clients moving workloads to the facility. “We’ve demonstrated production-grade AI infrastructure running entirely on hydrogen, with NVIDIA GB300 AI systems at rack densities well beyond what traditional data centers can support,” said Yuval Bachar, CEO and Founder of ECL.
Not only is the process completely clean and carbon-neutral, it also helps with water consumption (particularly pressing in California), as the energy production process creates water that can then be used for onsite cooling. The offgrid design of the site, combined with rear-door heat exchangers on the racks, take MV1’s PUE down to below 1.1, as well as delivering negative WUE.
-
Winning the Datacloud Global Award helped crystallize ECL’s position as a category creator, not just an experiment. It gave the industry confidence that hydrogen-powered, off-grid AI data centers are not aspirational concepts, but viable infrastructure at production scale. That recognition accelerated conversations with customers, partners, and policymakers who were already looking for alternatives to grid-dependent models.
Now the proof of concept is firing, ECL is planning a big next step. A 1GW facility to be built outside Houston with Lambda, an existing MV1 client, as the anchor tenant – and the site’s architecture could soon be spotted in other facilities, too.
“The operational learnings from MV1 directly informed FlexGrid, our new power-agnostic architecture that allows AI data centres to intelligently combine multiple energy sources - grid, hydrogen, natural gas, renewables, or others - into a single, reliable power system, enabling high-density AI deployment in locations where no single energy source is sufficient.”
Recognition from the Datacloud Global Awards judging team played an important role in spreading this technology – and ultimately improving the energy efficiency and reliability of digital infrastructure.
“Winning the Datacloud Global Award helped crystallize ECL’s position as a category creator, not just an experiment. It gave the industry confidence that hydrogen-powered, off-grid AI data centres are not aspirational concepts, but viable infrastructure at production scale. That recognition accelerated conversations with customers, partners, and policymakers who were already looking for alternatives to grid-dependent models,” said Bachar.