Bay Area company using hydrogen to power its data center
As California already struggles to meet its goal of electrification, technology experts said the future demands of artificial intelligence will require a doubling of the nation’s energy output.
But one Silicon Valley entrepreneur has developed a data center that generates not only the power to run it but also the water to cool it.
The biggest problem facing high tech these days is power. The huge data centers that contain the internet already take massive amounts of electricity, and experts said AI could increase that demand by a factor of 10.
Where’s all that power going to come from? It may be in Mountain View.
Yuval Bachar is the founder and CEO of a company called ECL. He left his engineering job at Microsoft because he had an idea: a new kind of data center.
Bachar said,
What you see over here is a rack which has the capacity of 1.5 million GPUs in this area, right here,
That’s equivalent to one and a half million high speed processors. He said the single 2-foot-wide rack was the most concentrated unit of computing power in the world. But it takes a lot of electricity, equivalent to 500 homes. And that’s where the real challenge came in.
Bachar said,
So, what we did, we said we’re going to run ours ‘off-grid.’ And we’re going to create our own energy on-site,
A lot of people are searching for ways to produce more power. Google is talking about reopening the Three Mile Island nuclear plant and President Trump recently said he wants to increase coal output to power high tech.
He said,
I call it beautiful, clean coal,
“I tell my people never use the word coal unless you put ‘beautiful, clean’ before it.”
But Bachar has a different solution: hydrogen. When exposed to ambient air temperatures, a huge tank of liquid hydrogen behind the data center begins a frosty transformation into a gas that powers a reactor creating electricity.
But it also creates something else important to data centers, water. As a byproduct of the chemical reaction, the plant generates about 200 gallons of pure, distilled water a day which is fed back into the data center to keep the processors cool.
He said,
It’s a factory not only for energy and AI,
“It’s actually a water factory, as well.”
Bachar said it’s true that liquid hydrogen itself takes a lot of energy to produce, but he said the advantage is it can be created in areas where renewable power is readily available and trucked or piped to wherever it’s needed.
The Mountain View center has been operating flawlessly for more than a year, but its 1-megawatt hydrogen generator is really just a pilot project. The company is currently building a 1-gigawatt plant, 1,000 times bigger, in Texas.
Bachar said,
We’re the first ones in the world who are actually running a hydrogen-based data center 24/7 for stationary power,
“That’s the first in the world over there, so that’s a major breakthrough.”
It’s something that many experts said couldn’t be done.
He said, with a smile,
Delivering something that a lot of people claim is not possible to deliver.
“And that’s the definition of innovation, right? Innovation is developing something that people say is impossible and people can use it.”
Technology often creates as many problems as it solves. But innovators, like Yuval Bachar, just see that as the next challenge to be overcome.
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Bay Area company using hydrogen to power its data center, source
