Artificial Intelligence (AI) won’t be consuming breakfast cereal, chocolate and coffee to keep it going through the day. Instead, it’ll be greedily chomping its way through large amounts of electricity – and will need this supply to be reliably backed up.

Rolls-Royce Power Systems, along with Power-to-X specialist Ineratec, reckons it can decarbonise at least this backup power “using synthetic e-fuels produced from renewable hydrogen and captured carbon dioxide”.

These fuels - Ineratec’s ISCC-certified “e-diesel”, produced in Frankfurt - will provide a ‘drop-in’ replacement to fossil diesel in emergency generators. They’ll be utilised in Rolls-Royce’s “MTU-branded emergency power systems”, which are already “widely used across critical infrastructure”.

This new partnership will initially “focus on the German market”.

Similarly in the US, “AI factories and data centres”, along with “distribution hubs and power grid augmentation”, are among the key sources of demand which have enabled HydrogenXT to secure “a definitive Term Sheet for $900 million in combined debt and equity financing with Kell Kapital Partners Limited (KKP) and its affiliated institutional backers”.

The money will be used to “support the construction of HydrogenXT's first 10 production and dispensing facilities across California, Oregon, Washington, North Dakota, and key U.S. logistics corridors”. HydrogenXT’s “flagship project” is based in Avenal, California and “is expected to break ground this fall”. Ultimately, the company is targeting the deployment of “100 zero carbon-intensity, fuel-grade, clean blue-hydrogen plants across North America and an additional 200+ dispensing stations”.

Normally, blue hydrogen is associated with large, centralised reforming facilities feeding into high-capacity carbon transport and storage infrastructure.

Aside from successfully convincing investors to part with lots of money, what makes this story more interesting is HydrogenXT’s approach of “local-scale SMR technology with 100% carbon capture” within “hydrogen production hubs equipped with on-site compression, storage, and dispensing (CSD) capabilities along with the ability to produce clean electricity”.