New hydrogen-powered data centres as a service offering

Newly established EdgeCloudLink (ECL) is offering off-grid green data centres in 1MW blocks with stated 99.9999% uptime.

The Silicon Valley headquartered company, the initiative of infrastructure architect and engineer Yuval Bachar, claims a first in offering a modular, sustainable off-grid solution with green hydrogen as the primary power source.

The offering is optimised for use by mid-sized data centre operators, typically large companies with a mix of cloud and on-premises IT environments, with the object of achieving two-thirds the total cost of ownership of traditional colocation data centre providers when measured over five years.

The modularity and lack of dependence on local utilities also means that the data centres can be designed and delivered more rapidly between six and nine months compared with the typical 18 to 24 months planning and construction cycle.

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Along with the new offering, ECL also has announced a $7 million seed financing round led by Molex Ventures and Hyperwise Ventures.

The funds will be used by ECL to expand its market presence and in the construction of its first data centre at its Mountain View headquarters, with completion scheduled for Q2 2023.

In addition to the green hydrogen power, other innovations in ECL’s design include the use of the water by-product of the hydrogen-based power generation for cooling the server racks.

This both eliminates the need for external cooling water resources and enables a high server density per rack, which in turn should reduce the total data centre footprint.

ECL estimates for its data centres a power usage effectiveness ratio, i.e. the total power used by the data centre versus the power delivered to the computing equipment, of 1.05, close to the optimum of 1, with up to 50kW per rack.

The solution is delivered with ECL’s proprietary platform, Lightning, which monitors and controls all aspects of the data centre, including power generation, power delivery and rack cooling, in real time.