Fuel cell firm Renewable Innovations has joined a US Department of Energy-backed research project to develop fuel cell power systems for AI data centers.

The project, called “FC-DC: Fuel Cell Solutions for Brownfield and Greenfield Data Centers,” is led by the DOE’s National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR) and is slated to run for three years.

The DOE’s Alternative Fuels and Feedstocks Office selected Renewable Innovations for its initiative to use fuel cells to meet AI power demand.

As part of the initiative, Renewable Innovations will design, build, and validate a fuel cell rack system intended to power and cool a high-power compute rack directly on the data center floor. The project will test how tightly coupled fuel cell and compute-rack architectures cope with the dynamic power profiles of AI workloads.

NLR will develop reference designs for brownfield retrofits and greenfield facilities, including 800VDC power distribution and fuel cell integration. It will also run digital real-time simulation, hardware-in-the-loop testing, and transient testing to validate performance.

The project includes a field demonstration at the Sky Data Centers site in Santa Rosa, California, which will evaluate fuel cell integration with 800VDC data center power architectures.

“By moving power generation directly to the compute load, we eliminate the complex distribution paths and energy loss typical of traditional power systems, making the entire power process significantly more efficient and responsive,” said Steve Hammond, senior research advisor at NLR.

Renewable Innovations claims that the project builds on earlier work with NLR and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, in which the three demonstrated a 70kW fuel cell integrated with cloud computing racks at NLR’s Energy Systems Integration Facility. CEO Bob Mount said the company showed more than seven years ago that hydrogen fuel cells could provide reliable power for data centers.

“Fuel cells offer an opportunity to rethink how power is generated, distributed, and managed inside the data center,” Mount said.

Other project partners include Nvidia, Energy Vault, DRG Technical Solutions, HPE Labs, and Alderbuck Energy, with additional organizations providing technical support. The primary aim of the initiative is to produce a commercialization-ready blueprint for fuel cell-powered data centers.

The announcement does not include the project’s funding level, the rack system's power rating, the fuel supply for the demonstration, or a date for the Santa Rosa deployment. The efficiency, noise, and water benefits are stated as goals, with the release saying the project will explore architectures that could reduce conversion losses and water consumption.

Founded in 2019 and headquartered in Lindon, Utah, Renewable Innovations develops modular, scalable hydrogen fuel cell and energy storage systems. The company primarily focuses on Proton Exchange Membrane hydrogen fuel cells, but has also begun to explore Solid Oxide Fuel Cells to power baseload offtakers such as data centers.

Fuel cells are growing in popularity across the data center sector. The biggest player is Bloom Energy, which has signed deals with several major operators and cloud firms, including Nebuis, Equinix, and Oracle.