EcoCeres and Chindata have signed a memorandum of understanding to evaluate hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO) as a renewable, drop-in replacement for conventional diesel in backup generators at selected Chindata data center sites in China. EcoCeres describes its HVO, produced from waste-based feedstocks, as delivering lifecycle greenhouse gas reductions of up to 94.4% compared with fossil diesel.
Why Data Centre Backup Power Is a Distinct Use Case
Every other fuel-switching story in this series has concerned a vehicle, vessel or aircraft in motion. Backup diesel generators at data centers sit still, running rarely, only during grid outages, but at guaranteed high reliability, since a failure risks the operational continuity of mission-critical digital infrastructure. HVO's appeal here is that it is chemically similar enough to conventional diesel to be used as a drop-in fuel in existing generators without equipment modification, meaning the switch addresses emissions without introducing new reliability risk to systems where failure is not an acceptable trade-off for decarbonization.
The Shared Ownership Behind the Partnership
Both companies are connected through the same private equity sponsor: Bain Capital holds a minority investment in EcoCeres, alongside Hong Kong and China Gas Company (Towngas), which incubated EcoCeres and remains a strategic shareholder, and separately led Chindata's USD 3.16 billion take-private in 2023, subsequently combining it with Bain's existing Bridge Data Centers platform. A shared institutional investor does not by itself explain why this specific MOU was signed, but it is a plausible factor in how the two companies came to work together, and worth noting as context rather than treating the partnership as two entirely unconnected companies finding each other independently.
Why This Matters Given the Broader AI Infrastructure Buildout
EcoCeres frames the collaboration explicitly against rising demand for data storage, cloud computing and AI infrastructure, and separately holds a similar MOU with Bridge Data Centers, Chindata's sister platform under the same ownership, to deploy HVO fuel at wider Asia-Pacific data center sites. As AI-driven data center construction accelerates, backup power emissions are becoming a genuinely relevant, if often overlooked, category within data center operators' broader Scope 1 and Scope 3 emissions accounting, alongside the far larger and more discussed question of data centers' primary electricity consumption.
What an MOU of This Kind Does, and Does Not, Confirm
This is an evaluation agreement, not a signed supply contract; neither company has disclosed volumes, site count, pricing, or a timeline for moving from evaluation to actual deployment. EcoCeres's own public materials describe this partnership, alongside its Bridge Data Centers and prior British Airways SAF agreements, as part of a broader pattern of applying the same core HVO product across multiple hard-to-abate sectors, transport and now data center backup power, using the same production base rather than developing sector-specific fuel products for each.
Source: Full Vision Capital, 15 July 2026.
