France – Atos and HDF Energy have announced their intention to build a full end-to-end long-term solution for the supply of green hydrogen data centers produced by renewable energy.
The new solution from Atos and HDF will be the first available on the market for data centers with high energy consuming workloads, with the goal of demonstrating the first full manufacturing center run using green hydrogen in 2023.
Atos will offer a full end-to-end green data center solution by developing and delivering infrastructure, software and integration services that allow the use of green hydrogen power to be used in data centers. This includes the use of the most sophisticated Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to maximize energy consumption. HDF Energy will supply a power plant that, due to its high-powered fuel cells, will provide predictable and durable electricity. This cells will be powered by renewable hydrogen from photovoltaic or wind farms.
A major technological challenge
Data centers have heavy energy demands, run 24/7, 365 days a year, and are cannot suffer the slightest energy loss. The approach taken by Atos and HDF is also especially optimistic since, by its very nature, solar or wind energy is renewable but volatile, flexible in supply and unreliable, rendering it unstable.
At a time when data center energy use is becoming a key problem and new energy models need to be considered, this new approach from Atos and HDF would allow data center operators and cloud operators to predict possible future constraints set by regulators and give their customers a viable yet efficient solution without sacrificing their business.
Combining expertise to reduce the carbon footprint
Atos’ approach requires a software layer to forecast the power usage requirements of the data center and to adjust the resource (green hydrogen) accordingly. This complex process is not only focused on the activity and scale of the data center, it also takes into account external data from the climate, such as weather forecasting. To this end, Atos brings its experience in HPC – an environment in which it, as Europe’s leading supercomputer maker, has many ground-breaking developments that restrict the energy usage of its systems.
Thanks to its experience in high-power hydrogen technology, HDF has built a new kind of power plant that is fully stable, non-polluting and efficient compared to fossil fuel generators. The availability constraints of the data center will be integrated in the design of Renewstable which will allow HDF to provide the highest quality of service to the most demanding customers.
Major milestone
This effort is a recent and crucial achievement in Atos’ Net Zero 2028 decarbonization ambition. In 2020, Atos has also expanded its data center decarbonization initiative, promoting improvements in energy quality, which has resulted in a 15% reduction in global energy usage at Atos data centers relative to 2019. In comparison, carbon-free and clean energies currently account for 55% of all Atos data centers (versus 32 percent in 2019). In addition, since 2014, Atos has offered carbon neutral hosting facilities to its customers by offsetting 100% of its data centers’ emissions.
