Innovation Award

Yuval Bachar

ECL

Yuval Bachar is a visionary leader who drives innovations that make digital infrastructure more efficient, more sustainable, more reliable and more accessible. His career spans leadership roles at Cisco, Juniper Networks, Facebook, LinkedIn and Microsoft. Today, he is Founder and CEO of ECL, where he is leading the development of the world’s first zero-emissions, hydrogen-powered AI data centers. Yuval’s approach to innovation is technical and practical, grounded in an understanding of global infrastructure challenges and the urgency to solve them.

Over the course of his career, Yuval has pioneered innovations that helped reshape the way modern data centers are conceived, scaled and operated. At LinkedIn, he led the company’s transformation from a large enterprise data center to a mega data center operator, guiding the expansion of its infrastructure footprint and developing systems that simplified and standardized deployment. His contributions include the Single-SKU data center model, which enables the construction and management of large-scale data centers using a single, uniform hardware building block. Building on this foundation, Yuval launched the Open19 Project at LinkedIn, which offered a modular and open hardware architecture that enabled dense, flexible and cost-effective server deployments.

Today, as founder and CEO of ECL, Yuval is focused on delivering sustainable, high-performance digital infrastructure that operates independently of the traditional power grid. ECL’s off-grid, hydrogen-powered AI data centers achieve zero emissions, generate their own cooling water and can be deployed in nine months or less. By decoupling data centers from fossil fuels and grid infrastructure, ECL’s solutions can be deployed in locations where traditional digital infrastructure is not economically viable, such as areas without reliable grid access, dense urban environments, rural communities and underserved regions.

Yuval’s career reflects a deep and sustained commitment to redefining what digital infrastructure can do.