From its beginning, the company has invested millions of dollars in making its own power-hungry data centers more efficient.
The project will make eBay the first major tech company to use fuel cells as a primary source for energy-hungry data centers.
It enables transparency that has fuelled a lot of activism, but it also obscures the energy-hungry data centres and low-wage workers who make a company such as Amazon possible.
As computing moves to the cloud, where music, photos and other data are stored on remote computers, companies are racing to make their power-hungry data centers more efficient.
If wireless carriers start upgrading their networks again, for instance, because consumers spend money on bandwidth-hungry data services such as music-downloading, Ericsson's profit warning would be forgotten.
The same rule, by and large, has applied to the architecture of cloud computing - the massive, energy-hungry data centers and servers that power services like Google, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon, which companies treat as proprietary secrets.
It will be the first major tech company to use alternative power as a primary source for energy-hungry data centers, although the new center will connect to the electricity grid for backup.
Though companies looking to power energy-hungry data centers have often sought out hydroelectric power, which does not depend on fossil fuels and is generally inexpensive, fuel-cell technology is gaining traction, especially for customers who need an extremely steady power supply even during storms.
This decision also helped persuade Google and Facebook to agree to spend $700m on building and expanding their energy-hungry data centres there.The effervescence of the wind industry last year, however, was partly because the main federal tax credit for wind power was going to expire in December, and companies raced to qualify before the deadline.
Energy-hungry data centers attract researchers' attention to energy consumption minimization a challenge confronted by both industry and academia.
