Data Center-as-a-Service startup ECL has announced a modular, sustainable, off-grid data center that uses green hydrogen as its primary power source. ECL will deliver data centers in 1MW blocks with 99.9999 percent uptime. The company also announced $7M in seed financing co-led by Molex Ventures and Hyperwise Ventures.

Lily Yeung, Vice President at Molex Ventures and Nathan Shuchami, Managing Partner at Hyperwise Ventures join ECL Founder and CEO Yuval Bachar as members of the ECL board of directors. The funds will be used by ECL to expand its market presence and in the construction of its first data center at the company’s Mountain View, Calif. headquarters, with completion scheduled for Q2 2023.

While other data center providers have deployed hydrogen fuel cells as backup power supplies, and with some conducting trials of systems forecast for production delivery in three-to-five years, ECL said that it is the first provider to deliver a fully-green hydrogen-powered data center.

Optimized for use by mid-sized data center operators – typically large companies with a mix of cloud and on-premises IT environments – ECL’s Datacenter-as-a-Service is two-thirds the total cost of ownership (TCO) of traditional colocation data center providers when measured over five years. The community-integrated data center design consumes no local resources, including power or water, and operates with zero emissions at extremely low noise levels. ECL’s modularity and lack of dependence on local utilities also means that its data centers can be designed and delivered much faster than others’, reducing planning and construction cycles from between 18 to 24 months to between six and nine months.

ECL data centers feature an advanced full data center management system – ECL Lightning – which is used to monitor and control every aspect of the ECL data center, from power generation to power delivery and rack cooling, in real time. Its intuitive UI provides comprehensive, clear and simple monitoring, which enables finite control of all aspects of operating the data center.