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No More Electrical Infrastructure: Towards Fuel Cell Powered Data Centers Ana Carolina Riekstin Sean James Aman Kansal University of Sao Paulo Microsoft Research Microsoft Research carolina.riekstin@usp.br seanja@ kansal@ Jie Liu Eric Peterson Microsoft Research Microsoft Research liuj@ eric.peterson@ ABSTRACT The first reason to consider FCs as data center power We consider the use of fuel cells for powering data cen- systems is reliability. The gas grid infrastructure is mainly ters, based on benefits in reliability, capital and opera- buried and not subjected to severe weather. Gas pumps tional costs, and reduced environmental emissions. Us- themselves are typically power by a portion of the gas ing fuel cells effectively in data centers introduces sev- flowing through the stations. Gas grid reliability is known eral challenges and we highlight key research questions to be high, and the delivery contracts exhibit reliabil- for designing a fuel cell based data center power distri- ity greater than 99.999% [12], much higher than the bution system. We analyze a specific configuration in 99.9% or less for the electric grid. As a result, FCs the design space to quantify the cost benefits for a large can eliminate diesel generators and batteries used for scale data center, for the most mature and commonly power backup. Local gas tanks