ECL

ECL, officially Edge Cloud Link Inc., is a venture capital-backed company founded in 2021 by Yuval Bachar, a seasoned technology executive with extensive experience at firms like Microsoft Azure, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Bachar's career, which includes founding the Open19 project, has been focused on data center infrastructure, leading to his mission to address the industry's sustainability challenges.

ECL operates in the green data center market, providing Data Center-as-a-Service for clients ranging from mid-sized operators and large enterprises to hyperscale cloud providers. The company's business model circumvents the limitations of traditional grid-dependent data centers by developing modular, off-grid facilities powered primarily by hydrogen fuel cells. This approach significantly reduces deployment time to as little as six to nine months, compared to the 18 to 24 months typical for conventional facilities. Revenue is generated through various models, including a build-and-hand-off option for a one-time fee, and a build-and-operate model with recurring monthly fees.

The core of ECL's service is its hydrogen-powered, modular data center, constructed in 1-megawatt (MW) blocks that can be scaled out to create larger campuses. A key feature is the system's efficiency and sustainability; it uses hydrogen to generate electricity, with water as the main byproduct, which is then repurposed for the facility's cooling systems. This closed-loop process eliminates the need for local water resources and results in zero carbon emissions. The facilities are engineered for high-density computing, initially supporting up to 75 kilowatts (kW) per rack, with designs underway to increase this to 125 kW to meet the demands of artificial intelligence (AI) workloads. The company has successfully launched its first 1 MW proof-of-concept data center in Mountain View, California, which is fully leased to AI hosting specialist Cato Digital. Following this milestone, ECL has raised a total of $17 million through seed and Series A funding rounds to fuel its expansion, including the development of a planned 1-gigawatt campus in Texas.

Keywords: hydrogen-powered data centers, Data Center-as-a-Service, off-grid data centers, sustainable data centers, modular data centers, Yuval Bachar, high-density cooling, green hydrogen, AI infrastructure, Edge Cloud Link, zero-emission data centers, data center power, sustainable infrastructure, data center cooling, colocation services, data center innovation, hydrogen fuel cells, enterprise data solutions, cloud infrastructure, technology infrastructure