Verne Global plans to trial and deploy hydrogen fuel cells at its 40-acre campus near Keflavik.
The company partnered with national power firm Landsvirkjun and regional hydrogen business Icelandic New Energy for the project.
“We’re looking forward to working with Verne Global on this project and helping them further capitalise on Iceland’s inimitable ability to provide green energy. We’re proud to undertake this pioneering project with an industry leader, which will, in turn, provide us with key insights into leveraging hydrogen power across Iceland and beyond,” said Hörður Arnarson, CEO, Landsvirkjun.
Dominic Ward, CEO at Verne Global, added: “We’re constantly searching for ways to improve our already market-leading sustainability credentials, so we jumped at the opportunity to work with Landsvirkjun and Icelandic New Energy to turn even our back-up data centre power ‘green.”
Verne was acquired by Digital 9 Infrastructure for $320 million last September, with the company investing $93 million to expand the campus to 40MW this January. The company’s foray into hydrogen comes as the data centre industry experiments with ways to get off of diesel backup power.
In February, Dutch data centre operator NorthC announced that it would install hydrogen fuel cells at its Groningen facility, the first in Europe. Microsoft has also invested heavily in exploring the sector. It powered a row of data centre servers for 48 consecutive hours using hydrogen fuel cells back in 2020, using a 250kW fuel cell from Power Innovations. Last year, it partnered with Caterpillar and Ballard Power Systems to trial 1.5MW hydrogen fuel cells.
Keppel Data Centres is studying powering its data centres in Singapore with hydrogen, signing multiple memorandums of understanding with businesses to explore the space.
