Data center service provider ECL exited stealth today with $7 million in seed funding and plans to build the first 3D-printed modular data center powered by green hydrogen in Mountain View, California.

While most people expect the data center of the future to arrive in a decade or two, "we are saying no – we can bring the future data centers to life in 2023," ECL Founder and CEO Yuval Bachar told SDxCentral. With plans for completion in the second quarter of this year, the CEO and his team from the "high end data center world" admit they still have ground to cover before completing their first "fully sustainable, novel design of a data center."

ECL claims its modular offering saves customers substantial amounts of time and money. The company operates on a six- to nine-month planning cycle for data center deployment, compared to the few years it may take with other providers. This quicker cycle alters "how [customers] select the hardware, how much space they need. It can be much more accurate to the demand from the platform that they're running," Bachar explained.

This aids ECL in lowering operating costs to reach competitive prices per megawatt (MW), even at a 1MW scale. "We don't need to build a very large site to make it competitive," Bachar claimed, adding that his company can build a solution "superior to colocation by about 50%," and "in some cases, we can actually have a superior TCO [total cost of ownership] compared to any traditional colocation data enters."

Due to its modular design, ECL can build a small number of 1MW blocks and extend that as the customer requires. "We can repeat it 100 times if we want to," he said. Even with a one block customer, ECL optimizes that block "to the point it's actually as cost effective as building a 50MW site."

Although ECL could charge just as much as colocation or hyperscale providers, it passes those cost savings to the customer. "We want this to be a very popular solution that people will take and adopt," he said. "A lot of people told us, 'Are you building this sustainable, fully sustainable data center? What's the premium we need to pay?' The answer is you don't need to pay a premium."

Aside from those more explicit business-facing benefits, Bachar highlighted how ECL's sustainability priorities impact local environments and communities. Boasting a platform power use effectiveness (PUE) score of 1.05 – where 1.0 is ideal – "we are the best in class in all dimensions," he touted. "We do not use water. We do not use green electricity. We're zero emissions."

He claimed environmental sustainability is embedded in every part of what ECL does, "from the cooling system design to the hydrogen power generation and distribution, the water we use, the hot water that we have – everything is coming to a point to create something we call a community-integrated data center," which means the community benefits from the data center's existence. "We provide for them hot water and cold water. We will not impact their environment at all. We are almost silent from a noise pollution [perspective], and we are zero emissions and zero impact to the water."

"It's super important for us to create a data center blueprint that every company can use to be sustainable, and that's the future of our current generation. Our next generation of data centers have to be sustainable," he argued.

Green hydrogen is a source of sustainable fuel when it’s burned using renewable power sources. This allows it to only generate energy in the form of heat with water as a byproduct. As internet traffic and demand for data rises, green hydrogen is becoming an increasingly plausible energy source for the data center industry.

Data center colocation provider Equinix announced a partnership last fall with the National University of Singapore’s Centre for Energy Research and Technology (CERT) to develop data center infrastructure technology for tropical regions that uses green hydrogen as a source of fuel. Equinix said it will use the research to develop proof-of-concept projects in its network of data centers for real-world testing, which will provide support for future incorporation into its data centers.