ECL Unveils World’s First Off-Grid, Hydrogen-Powered AI Data Center
June 20 2024 - 11:00AM
Business Wire
$10M additional funding led by Hyperwise
Ventures is being used to accelerate innovation and delivery of
additional off-grid, sustainable, modular, built-to-suit data
centers with fully renewable power and zero emissions,
purpose-built for AI
Sustainable bare metal cloud pioneer Cato
Digital named ECL’s first tenant
Data Center-as-a-Service pioneer ECL today announced the
delivery of the world’s first data center that uses hydrogen as its
primary power source at MV1, its facility in Mountain View,
California. The company also announced an additional $10M in
funding led by Hyperwise Ventures, which will be used to accelerate
research and development and expand the company’s global footprint.
ECL's off-grid, sustainable, modular, built-to-suit data centers
are the industry’s first to be designed from the ground up to
support the 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.
This press release features multimedia. View
the full release here:
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240620107869/en/
Data Center-as-a-Service pioneer ECL
today announced the delivery of the world’s first data center that
uses hydrogen as its primary power source at MV1, its facility in
Mountain View, California. (Photo: Business Wire)
ECL Purpose-built for AI
ECL data centers are optimized to support the massive amounts of
computational power required by AI workloads, making them ideally
suited for companies seeking to deliver AI applications or to
leverage AI to accelerate their own innovation and operations. They
are designed to be built and operated off-grid by any company in
need of scalable data center capacity, including enterprises in
addition to cloud providers and other hyperscale service providers.
ECL data centers provide the industry’s lowest TCO and fastest
time-to-market, with unprecedented flexibility in terms of
location, size, and density.
ECL's unique support for AI infrastructure is further advanced
by its innovative data center management system, ECL Lightning™,
which provides real-time monitoring and control of every aspect of
the data center, from power generation to power delivery and rack
cooling. Its intuitive UI gives customers comprehensive visibility
and configuration capabilities, ensuring that AI and other
workloads are always performing optimally.
ECL cooling innovations, including utilization of water created
from hydrogen-based power generation and proprietary rear door heat
exchanger technology for high-density rack cooling, completely
eliminate reliance on local resources. ECL data centers are
modular, giving customers the option to expand them as needed in
1MW increments. They are also built-to-suit and can be designed and
delivered in less than 12 months instead of the industry standard
two-to-three years.
Cato Digital Named First Tenant
Sustainable bare metal cloud provider Cato Digital, led by
longtime data center industry innovator and iMasons founder Dean
Nelson, is ECL’s first customer. 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 (SLMs) that are predicted to be even more
pervasive than concentrated LLM training data centers. The company
is deploying NVIDIA DGX hardware configured at the highest density
possible to fully utilize the ECL design at MV1. ECL and Cato are
founding members of the iMasons Climate Accord (ICA), an industry
body of over 260 companies representing a combined market cap of
$6T USD that have united on decarbonizing digital
infrastructure.
“The rapid expansion of AI has put incredible strain on global
data center power capacity,” said Nelson. “Building more of today’s
current data centers won’t solve it. We have to rethink how to
deploy dense compute to serve this unprecedented growth. 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. Cato has been closely aligned and
involved with ECL since its inception. We are extremely proud to be
the first tenant at this iconoclastic new site in the heart of
Silicon Valley.”
Established in 2021, ECL is led by Yuval Bachar, who previously
held top engineering, infrastructure and architecture roles at
Microsoft Azure, LinkedIn, Facebook, Cisco, Juniper Networks, and
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Bachar was a founder of the
Open19 project, a data center industry initiative establishing a
new open standard for servers based on a common form factor, and is
the past president of the Open19 Foundation. He holds eight U.S.
patents with an additional 20 pending in data center, networking,
and system design and is the recipient of three Cisco Pioneer
Awards.
“Many data center providers have identified hydrogen as the
power source of choice for the future of the data center due to its
exceptional safety record, improved efficiency and reliability,
sustainability, and recent technological advancements,” said Yuval
Bachar, Founder and CEO of ECL. “The significant upfront cost
associated with re-engineering existing facilities and
transitioning to hydrogen fuel cells makes the transition
prohibitive for most data center operators, whose revenue forecasts
and financial stability are rooted in the perpetuation of legacy
technologies. ECL has broken the mold, 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 realize 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."
About ECL
ECL is leading the way in the delivery of off-grid, reliable,
sustainable, cost-effective hydrogen-powered Data
Centers-as-a-Service. The company’s founders are data center
veterans of some of the most prominent companies in technology,
including Facebook, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Cisco, HPE and Bloom
Energy. Its technology includes extensive innovation in power
management and cooling. ECL is backed by Molex and Hyperwise
Ventures and headquartered in Mountain View, Calif. For more
information, visit www.ecldc.com.
View source
version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240620107869/en/
Wilson Craig Mindshare PR wilson@mindsharepr.com
408-516-6182