ECL, a data center developer, has debt and equity investors lined up for the first phase of a hydrogen-powered data center near Dallas, Texas.
The investors have also committed to follow-up phases at the site, ECL CEO Yuval Bachar said via email.
The developer recently announced it will build what it calls the first fully sustainable 1 GW AI Factory data center, ECL TerraSite-TX1, near Houston. The first 50 MW phase is planned for the summer of 2025 and will cost approximately $450m. The full 1 GW scope is expected to cost $8bn.
The data center’s first tenant is Lambda, a cloud provider.
ECL is pursuing hydrogen-based power for the facility instead of renewables, Bachar said. Hydrogen will be provided by three separate pipelines that converge at the site, eliminating the need for additional fuel transportation, according to the company.
“It is not feasible to build a data center with renewable power with batteries only for many reasons, primarily cost, space, availability, and redundancy,” Bachar said.
Several developers in power-intensive industries have backed out of projects recently, citing competition for renewable power. Bachar said he does not view locational competition for renewable power as an impediment for his development model.
“Since renewables do not offer a solution for data centers I do not see a situation of making the location not viable for data centers,” he said.
In some cases, power prices can be passed through to data center tenants, “but not necessarily in the case of on-site generation,” he said.
He added that data centers can be economically viable at an energy cost of $0.1-0.2/kwh.
