Located near Houston, the factory will develop, manufacture and deploy AI technologies. In addition to the data centres, TerraSite1 will provide AI experts, researchers, data scientists and engineers to create the AI solutions.

Hydrogen will be supplied by three separate pipelines that meet at TerraSite1, eliminating the need for additional fuel transportation.

Costing approximately $450m, the first phase is expected to be delivered next year (2025) and have 50MW of data centre capacity utilised by Oracle, Lambda, Cato Digital and additional tenants.

H2 View understands that the remainder of the site will be delivered for around $8bn, with the funding provided by site tenants.

Data centres and data transmission networks are now reported to consume 1-1.5% of global electricity and have been responsible for 1% of energy-related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions since 2023.

Speaking to H2 View this year, ECL CEO, Yuval Bachar, claimed the Californian firm wanted to create a fully sustainable solution. “To do that, the only way is to go off-grid and generate energy onsite with a microgrid with hydrogen,” he said.

Read more: Why hydrogen could play a role in primary power for data centres

Bachar added that if ECL was to compete with larger scale 250-400MW data centres, its product would need to be scalable.

He explained, “We created all these features on a small scale – a modular block of 1MW which we can repeat as many times as we want. So, if we build a 100MW site, we use 100 of them and we do not scale up, we only scale out.”