Atos and HDF Energy to develop the first green hydrogen datacenter

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Paris, February 25, 2021 – Atos and HDF Energy today announce their plan to develop a complete end-to-end long-term solution to supply datacenters with green hydrogen generated by renewable energy. The new solution by Atos and HDF will be the first available on the market for datacenters with heavy power consuming workloads, with the aim to demonstrate, in 2023, a first full production center operated using green hydrogen. 

Atos will provide a complete end-to-end green datacenter solution by designing and providing the hardware, software and integration services that make it possible to exploit the electricity produced by green hydrogen so that it can be used in datacenters. This includes using the most advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies to optimize energy consumption. HDF Energy will supply a power plant, which will provide predictable and firm electricity thanks to its high-powered fuel cells. These cells will be powered by green hydrogen derived from photovoltaic or wind farms.

A major technological challenge

Datacenters have high energy needs, operate 24/7, 365 days a year, and cannot experience the slightest energy flaw. Therefore, the approach taken by Atos and HDF is particularly ambitious, as by its very nature, solar or wind energy is clean but intermittent, variable in its production and unpredictable, making it an unstable energy.
At a time when datacenter energy consumption is becoming a key issue and it is essential to consider new energy models, this new solution from Atos and HDF will enable datacenter operators and cloud operators to anticipate potential future constraints set by regulation authorities and offer a sustainable but reliable solution to their customers, with no compromise on their business.

Combining expertise to reduce the carbon footprint

Atos’ solution includes a software layer to predict the datacenter’s power consumption needs and adapt the resource (green hydrogen) accordingly. This complex process is not only based on the datacenter’s activity and size but also takes into account external data from the environment, such as weather forecasting. To this, Atos brings its HPC expertise – an area in which it, as the leading supercomputer manufacturer in Europe, has several groundbreaking innovations which limit the energy consumption of its systems¹.