When AI Data Centres Become Hydrogen's Next Customer
Sweden's PowerCell has won a firm hydrogen fuel-cell order for a Californian AI data centre, backed by Bosch and paired with a non-binding MOU for around 300 MW more. For the Latvian hydrogen ecosystem, it is an early signal that AI's power hunger is opening a new offtake market on our doorstep.
NEWS
HydrogenLatvia
7/22/20262 min read
A firm handshake in a Swedish laboratory does not usually register in Riga. Yet the order it sealed this month deserves a close read across the Latvian hydrogen ecosystem, because it is one of the clearest signals yet that the world's fastest-growing electricity consumer — the AI data centre — is turning to hydrogen to secure the power it cannot pull from the grid.
A Baltic Sea neighbour at the centre of the deal
The supplier is Sweden's PowerCell — a near neighbour in the Baltic Sea region, not a distant Californian start-up. It has secured a firm order to supply its containerised PS190 hydrogen fuel-cell systems to US off-grid data-centre developer ECL for a planned facility, CSC-1, in Santa Clara, alongside a non-binding memorandum of understanding for around 300 MW of additional capacity to support ECL's future deployments.
The weight of the deal is underlined by who stands behind it. Bosch, PowerCell's largest shareholder, is expected to handle manufacturing and North American service — the kind of industrial backing that turns a pilot into a product line. The companies have chosen not to disclose the size or value of the firm order itself, but the direction of travel is unmistakable.
Why AI is turning to hydrogen
The logic is spelled out by ECL's chief executive, Yuval Bachar, who says demand from AI operators for power in constrained markets "far exceeds what any single grid connection can deliver." In parts of the US, waiting for a new grid connection can now take more than a decade, so developers are building their own power behind the meter — and fuel cells are increasingly part of that mix.
ECL's Santa Clara site is a 35 MW campus designed around a blend of grid electricity, natural gas, batteries and hydrogen fuel cells, with a first phase built to support up to 2.5 MW of AI computing. It follows PowerCell's fuel cells already running at ECL's entirely hydrogen-powered data centre in Mountain View, California — evidence this is a deepening relationship, not a one-off trial. PowerCell chief executive Richard Berkling calls the combined order and MOU a "clear signal" that hydrogen-powered data centres are moving toward "industrial scale."
The honest part of the story
None of this means hydrogen has won the data-centre market. The same reporting notes that many operators still favour fuel cells running on natural gas, because clean hydrogen remains costly and hard to source at scale. That caveat is the whole game: the demand is now real and industrial, but capturing it with genuinely green hydrogen depends on getting cheap, abundant renewable supply to the meter.
What the signal means for Latvia
This is where the story stops being a Californian curiosity. Latvia is expanding its grid and rethinking how it balances a power system that will lean ever harder on wind and solar — and, as Latvian hydrogen ecosystem stakeholders have argued, that system will need a flexibility layer that green hydrogen and Power-to-X are well placed to provide.
A hydrogen project's hardest question is usually who will buy the molecules. The PowerCell–ECL deal points to an answer that barely existed two years ago: data centres that need firm, behind-the-meter power in places the grid cannot yet reach. If AI's appetite is opening that market for a Swedish neighbour, it is a demand signal worth building toward here — provided the renewable hydrogen supply is ready to meet it.
