"We call this technology a 'wireless fiber patch cord' because it offers the blistering speed of fiber optics without the physical cables," said Payam Heydari, NCIC Labs director, UC Irvine Chancellor's Professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and senior author of both papers.

Scott Samuelsen, director of the National Fuel Cell Research Center at the University of California, Irvine, said data centers could become an important market for fuel cells because the industry “appears to want to be more environmentally sensitive but more reliant on their own resources.”