Rent-a-GPU outfit Lambda says its latest Nvidia GB300 NVL72 system is not only powered entirely by hydrogen fuel cells but doesn’t consume a single ounce of water.
In fact, the fuel cell used to convert the explosive gas into electrons actually generates water as a byproduct, which ECL, the bit barn operator housing the cluster, says is recycled for facility cooling.
The off-grid datacenter, announced back in 2023, is located at ECL’s Mountain View (MV1) campus and powered entirely by hydrogen fuel cells that, much like those found on spacecraft, combine hydrogen with oxygen from the atmosphere, generating power in the process.
In total, ECL claims its facility can support up to a megawatt of capacity. While that might sound like a lot of power, it’s only enough for a handful of racks, even with Lambda increasing its lease commitment from “50 percent to 100 percent of the facility.”
These dense, rack-scale systems announced back at GTC this spring feature 72 of Nvidia’s hottest Blackwell Ultra accelerators. In total, the system boasts roughly 20TB of HBM3e memory and an exaFLOP of dense FP4 performance. The consequence of such a dense system is power consumption.
While a typical 4-node DGX deployment might have required 40 to 50 kilowatts per rack of power and cooling during the Hopper generation, just one of the Supermicro-built GB300 NVL72 systems is rated for 142 kilowatts of capacity.
Lambda didn’t disclose how many of these systems it’s deploying at the site. But considering a fully loaded GB300 Superpod, which includes eight NVL72 rack systems, requires more than a megawatt of power, we can assume it’s fewer than that. We’ve reached out to Lambda for clarification; we’ll let you know if we hear anything back.
Capacity isn’t the only challenge. While many see hydrogen as a cleaner alternative to fossil fuels, that’s only true if the gas was generated using clean energy in the first place. In an earlier press release, ECL claimed its MV1 datacenter would use green hydrogen, which is produced by electrolyzing water using power from renewable sources like wind or solar.
MV1’s location in California is no surprise. The state is one of the few in the nation with significant hydrogen fuel generation, storage, and distribution infrastructure.
ECL’s MV1 campus is just a preview of a gigawatt-scale datacenter campus called TerraSite-TX1, which it’s building outside Houston and claims will also be powered by hydrogen. The first 50MW of capacity was slated to come online this summer with Lambda set to be one of the first tenants at the 600 acre facility
Hydrogen will reportedly be funneled to the facility by way of three separate pipelines converging on the site and will reportedly provide enough capacity for up to 2GW of compute in the future. How much of that fuel will come from sustainable sources remains to be seen. We’ve reached out to ECL for comment. ®