Swedish fuel cell technology developer PowerCell Group (PowerCell) has announced that it has signed an agreement with a US-based data center provider to supply two PowerCell PS190 fuel cell power systems for field validation in a data center application.
According to a statement, the systems will be delivered on a 6–12-month lease, the value of which has not been disclosed, starting in Q1 2026, and will be integrated with PowerCell’s Distributed Master Controller (DMC).
This data center provider is a pioneer indata-center operation, looking for solutions that combine resilience, scalability, and zero-emission operation. This agreement gives both companies a platform to validate performance and integration in a demanding application where reliability and power quality are critical. We have taken the time to design a product portfolio that is industrial, cost-competitive, and optimized for power-generation duty cycles. This is a natural next step in our strategy, said Richard Berkling, CEO of PowerCell Group.
Integration with PowerCell’s DMC platform
The systems will be integrated with PowerCell’s Distributed Master Controller (DMC), the control architecture designed to coordinate and optimize multiple fuel-cell units as a unified system.
Leveraging PowerCell’s experience from aviation and marine multi-unit environments, the DMC provides intelligent load balancing for higher uptime
improved durability through optimized operating points, stable system performance under dynamic and mission-critical loads, and a single, simplified interface for supervisory control.
For data center applications, where resilience and continuity are fundamental, the DMC provides the system-level behavior required to evaluate fuel cells as part of next-generation power designs.
Hydrogen as a complement in modern data-center power
Growing compute demand, grid constraints, and the need for local zero-emission power open new opportunities for hydrogen in data-center design.
According to PowerCell, hydrogen fuel cell (HFC) systems can complement existing infrastructure where grid access is constrained, power demand grows faster than local expansion, and longer-duration, low-emission backup is required.
PowerCell is leading the way in stationary hydrogen fuel cell solutions for data centers, providing clean, reliable, and cost-effective power. This partnership marks a significant step toward enabling large-scale deployment of fuel cells and delivering supplemental power for AI inference at edge locations. Hydrogen will not replace established solutions overnight, but it will become an important complement where grid availability, resilience, and long-duration backup increasingly matter. This agreement with the data center provider reflects a clear, early movement in that direction, concluded Richard Berkling.
