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Who remembers when Green Hydrogen was all the rage during the COVID years? No doubt, Fortescue Metals’ (ASX:FMG) Andrew Forrest remembers.
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Forrest, or Twiggy as he’s less-often called these days, spent a lot of money travelling the world in the early 2020’s spruiking green hydrogen everywhere from Paris to Oman, convincing the world (or perhaps himself) that green hydrogen was the way of the future.
Then, seemingly out of nowhere, Forrest massively cut back Fortescue Future Industries (FFI), a massive spin-out of FMG focused on Hydrogen that had started to hurt the latter’s share price.
As I wrote at the time, while Anthony Albanese spruiked hydrogen in China halfway through 2025, Forrest was at that time making it clear he was all but exiting the hydrogen game for good.
Looking at the Global X Hydrogen ETF HGEN, from the day it listed in 2022, one has a fairly solid benchmark to track the rise and fall of green hydrogen hype.
In 2022 it was all the rage, by 2023 it had died off, and as the world recovered from COVID, the basket of hydrogen stocks encapsulated by HGEN fell off a little bit as the world got more interested in other thematics – mainly, the Mag7 trade. At least, that was the case before ChatGPT.
It’s ChatGPT that comes into the explanation of why, exactly, HGEN is now at its former record highs, and returning nearly +200% across the last twelve months.
That’s because the possibility that hydrogen might pose an alternative energy source for the massive data centres so-called AI technology needs to operate has put the alternative energy fuel source hydrogen back on the radar.
I’ve written many times that the idea hydrogen could be ported to household stoves is dead in the water, because you can’t actually port hydrogen gas through existing oil and gas infrastructure. It causes embrittlement, which is to say the pipes’ lifespans are massively reduced, and nobody’s going to insure that, or pay for replacements.
In fact, Australia’s consumer regulator the ACCC took AGN to court last year over claims that hydrogen could be used to cook Australian home meals. In the regulator’s words, it’s “not possible.”
That was a low point for the hydrogen thematic. But when facing a new role as a green fuel for data centres, which are controversial for their environmental impacts, suddenly, hydrogen has come back to the fore.
It is a maybe not-so-interesting sign of the times, then, that AI truly can raise all boats: including the spirits of the dead ones. Whether or not the role of hydrogen in powering AI data centres remains feasible in the near-term, can be profitable, or is more than just an R&D tax rebate strategy, is a wait-and-see type of operation.
But for now and in a blast to the relative past, for risk-hungry investors, hydrogen is back on the menu.
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