Energy
Bloom Energy (BE): Combustion-Free Electricity To Power The AI Boom
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Energy is the lifeblood of industrial civilization. For a long time, this has taken the form of fossil fuels, which, even to this day, represent the bulk of primary energy consumption.
Today, energy consumption is shifting toward electricity, with heating, transportation, and industry consuming power rather than fossil fuels (at least directly).
At the same time, gigawatt-scale data centers are being built all over the USA and the world, each consuming as much power as the production of a nuclear reactor.
The combination of the AI boom and the trend of electrification means that generating enough power is increasingly becoming the chokepoint for any large-scale IT or industrial project. As such, dispatchable, flexible, and quick-to-deploy power generation is increasingly commanding a premium, while the grid and utility companies struggle to keep up with growing demand.
Historically, this would have taken the form of building fossil-fuel-powered turbines, but the producers of such turbines are already working at maximum capacity, and most have backlog stretching into the early 2030s.
“GE Vernova (GEV ) alone reported a combined gas turbine backlog of 100 gigawatts (GW) in the first quarter of 2026, up from 83 GW at the end of 2025, with the company’s chief executive telling investors he expects turbine reservations to be sold out through 2030 by the end of this year. ”
More recently, this can also take the form of renewable facilities, but they still need costly batteries to operate reliably 24/7.
An alternative technology to polluting and often unavailable gas turbines, or costly battery park, is fuel cells. Solid-oxide fuel cells directly convert fuel into electricity, without passing through the combustion stage. This reduces emissions, making permitting easier. And as it does not rely on complex manufacturing of advanced turbines, it can be scaled up more quickly to answer the massive bump in power demand to power AI data centers and other facilities without waiting until the 2030s.
Source: Bloom Energy [securities_stock_price_tag symbol="BE" exchange="NYSE"]
Currently, they are most often powered by natural gas, but will also be easy to adapt to hydrogen or other green fuels in the future, helping make fuel cells and electrolyzers a natural bridge technology between the old fossil-fuel-powered economy and the green energy future.
One pioneering company in this field is Bloom Energy.
BE Price Chart
Bloom Energy Overview
Bloom Energy History
Bloom Energy was founded in 2002 under the name Ion America, later renamed to Bloom Energy in 2006, by James McElroy & KR Sridhar, the developer of the first hydrogen fuel cell in the 1960s for NASA’s Gemini program and the producer of a technology to convert Martian atmospheric gases to oxygen for propulsion and life support.
The company fielded some prototypes of its technology, including a 5 kW field-trial unit, to the University of Tennessee in 2006, and the first commercial 100 kW servers to Google in July 2008. It fully exited “stealth mode” in 2010 when it revealed its Bloom Energy Server (“Bloom Box”), a fuel cell able to produce on-site electricity through direct oxidation of fuel without combustion.
The fuel cells use 15%-20% less fuel to produce the same amount of energy compared with combustion turbines. Every year, for over a decade, our fuel cells have seen double-digit, year-over-year cost reductions.”
This immediately attracted a lot of interest from investors, and the company hit a valuation of $2.9B by 2011, and raised several billion dollars in funding in the next few years. It started to add many top companies to its customer roster, including Walmart (WMT ), FedEx (FDX ), Metronix, Ferrari, Coherent, etc.
Source: Bloom Energy
The company performed its IPO in 2018. After a peak in stock price in mid 2018, it suffered a steep decline and had lost as much as 50% by 2020, driven by instability in federal subsidies of low-carbon energy projects and the company struggling to be profitable.
In 2022, the company started to produce high-efficiency hydrogen electrolyzers. It also started a partnership to combine its fuel cell technology with carbon capture technology, so that the produced energy is essentially carbon neutral even when it’s powered by natural gas.
From 2024 to today, Boom Energy has been refocusing from its initial market of hospitals, remote sites, and backup power generation to data centers, leading to a massive boom in both sales and its stock price.
For example, Bloom Energy and Oracle (ORCL ) announced in April 2026 a partnership for 2.8 GW of Bloom Energy’s fuel cell capacity, which includes a 2.45GW site.
“The company can now compete in ‘large, power-hungry markets’ across the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic, and Texas, not just in higher-priced electricity markets like California and the northeastern United States.
Bloom Energy By The Numbers
The company has spent $1.2B in cumulative R&D, resulting in 600+ patents protecting its solid oxide fuel cell technology.
The fuel cells are manufactured mainly on two sites: San Jose, California, the corporate Headquarters and R&D center, and Newark, Delaware (Mass Assembly and Production Center), with a global footprint >1,300,000 Square feet.
Source: Bloom Energy
Around 2/3rd of the 2,200+ people workforce is located in the USA, with the rest spread in local offices in India, South Korea, Taiwan, and Europe.
Over its lifetime, Bloom Energy has deployed as much as $1.4B in cumulative power capacity at over 1,200+ sites. Following a recent ramp-up in manufacturing capacity, Bloom Energy is going to be able to manufacture up to 2GW of capacity yearly by the end of 2026.
This boom in production should result in a steep growth in revenues as well, with 2026’s revenues expected at $3.4B-$3.8B, up from $2B in 2025 and $1.5B in 2024, as well as gross margin growing to 34% from 30% in 2025.
In October 2025, Brookfield (BAM ) and Bloom Energy announced a $5 billion strategic AI infrastructure partnership. The agreement was later expanded to $25B in June 2026.
“Bloom’s advanced fuel cell technology gives us the unique capability to design and construct modern AI factories with a holistic and innovative approach to power needs. As the world’s largest AI infrastructure investor, this partnership adds a powerful new tool to our global growth strategy, especially in a grid-constrained market environment.”
Sikander Rashid, Global Head of AI Infrastructure at Brookfield.
The result should be a 2026 operating income of $600M – $750M, tripling 2025’s $221M net operating income, and a doubling of cash flow from operating activities to $200M for 2026.
Source: Bloom Energy
Bloom Energy Technology
How Bloom’s Fuel Cells Work
Bloom Energy fuel cells convert fuel into high-efficiency electricity without combustion, producing high-temperature air and a high-concentration CO2 stream. To do so, it uses a solid ceramic material as an electrolyte. These fuel cells operate at extreme temperatures (600°C to 1,000°C), mediating direct oxidation via transport of O²⁻ ions and a reaction producing water (H2O) and CO2 from hydrocarbon fuels, or just water when green hydrogen is the fuel.
Source: Bloom Energy
This method does not use any precious metals like platinum, contrary to many other catalytic systems. This makes it less sensitive to fluctuations in the price of these commodities and also explains that this type of fuel cell can be used at a utility scale instead of more niche mobility applications.
Modularity, Speed & Scalability
Because the system relies on individual fuel cells of a 25W capacity, large generators are created by stacking these cells together. This makes the design inherently modular, with more power just requiring more cells.
Source: Bloom Energy
Thanks to pre-existing production lines for other markets and no critical material bottleneck, Bloom Energy is now ready to scale up production quickly for AI and reindustrialization projects. Developers of AI data centers are expecting 100% onsite power generation to be as large as 33% by 2030 and 44% by 2035, reflecting the growing realization that the general power grid will just not be enough to satisfy demand in a reasonable timeframe, especially as many projects are already being delayed by permitting and grid connections.
Source: Bloom Energy
It should be noted that solid oxide fuel cells have been the energy technology that has been the quickest to scale up in history. Its extreme reliability has also been a selling point, with options for guaranteed availability ranging from 3-9s (99.9%) up to 5-9s (99.999%) and delivery in as little as 90 days. Low carbon emissions and near-zero emissions of NOx/SOx help with getting quick permitting as well.
Source: Bloom Energy
Toward DC Data Centers
Power grids are delivering AC power, as this is a requirement for long-distance power transmission without too large losses. However, computing requires DC power, forcing AI data centers to rely on complex and increasingly unavailable transformers, themselves consuming a large amount of copper and other minerals.
Bloom Energy’s fuel cells can instead directly produce DC power, saving space and equipment for AI data center infrastructure.
Source: Bloom Energy
Direct DC architectures are expected to become more and more important in data center design, reaching 100% of new designs after 2030.
Future-Ready Power Generation
Initially, Bloom Energy’s main offer was energy from natural gas that was lower in carbon emissions than the grid, also limiting other pollutant emissions, all while delivering quickly, reliable onsite power generation.
As the demand for even lower emissions grows, the company is uniquely placed to improve the efficiency of its customers’ facilities.
For once, the fuel cell produces a concentrated CO2 stream that is easy to combine with carbon capture technology, reducing emissions to virtually zero when it is done.
Another factor is that the hot air stream cogenerating with the electricity can be used as well through Combined Heat and Power (CHP). The captured heat can be used for space heating, hot water, or industrial processes, boosting total system efficiency up to 80%–90%. It can also be imagined that heat batteries could be used to store that energy as well.
Lastly, the same scientific principles powering the fuel cells can be used for electrolyzers producing green hydrogen. So as solar energy gets cheaper and hydrogen becomes a more common fuel, Bloom Energy can also benefit from increasing demand in hydrogen, which can then be consumed in its own fuel cell power units, cutting fossil fuels from the equation entirely.
Bloom Energy Investment Case
Bloom Energy Pros
Bloom Energy has been one of the stocks greatly benefiting from the AI boom, its stock price rising more than 10x, and it kept announcing multi-GW deals, dwarfing the 1.4GW cumulative power capacity installed in the previous 20 years of the company.
This marked the transition of Bloom Energy from a provider of microgrid systems and backup generators to a power generation company essential to the compute and IA industry. This is likely to create massive economies of scale, leading to its fuel cells becoming even more competitive.
In addition, the flexibility in its design regarding fuel sources (natural gas, biogas, hydrogen, mixed gases) makes it a good option for future-proofing data center infrastructures against changes in carbon emissions regulations.
The ongoing switch to DC-first architecture is also a tailwind for Bloom Energy, as it helps simplify data center design and remove bottlenecks such as transformer availability.
Lastly, the company’s electrolyzer technology could be a great secondary business in case the hydrogen economy takes off, which would, in turn, also increase demand for solid-oxide fuel cell generators burning green hydrogen for power generation. Powering ships with fuel cells could also be an option in the long run.
Bloom Energy Cons
One key argument for using Bloom Energy fuel cells to power data centers is the speed of deployment and the lower carbon and NOx emissions it can offer compared to other on-site power technologies like gas micro-turbines.
However, the same argument could favor even more solar + battery installations, especially in regions with good sunny weather almost all year-round, like many states in the Southern USA. So the current boom could start to face serious competition as utility-scale batteries are getting cheaper, notably thanks to the arrival of commercially viable sodium-ion batteries and other chemistries not based on lithium.
Similarly, other alternatives might be viable and in a price point competitive with solid-oxide fuel cells. For example, nuclear SMRs (small Modular Reactors) are increasingly expected to carry a lot of the AI data center power load. Similarly, if ramp-up of power generation and grid capacity ultimately proves sufficient, then grid connection + local battery park could be enough to satisfy data center demand as well.
The actual demand for compute is also yet to be seen, as US-based AI companies are likely going to compete hard with open-source Chinese AI models, at least in overseas markets. More efficient AI models and less energy-hungry hardware like TPUs and neuromorphic chips could also reduce the current energy demand projected from GPUs’ needs.
So overall, at current stock prices, an investment in Bloom Energy is a bet on the continuation of the AI boom and fuel cells staying competitive versus alternatives like SMRs and large-scale battery parks. It is a bet that certainly can make sense, but which is not without risks either.
Bloom Energy’s Future
Irrespective of the investment case today after the strong rise of its stock price, Bloom Energy is a very interesting technology company that built its recent success over two decades of scientific excellence and intelligent business build-up, correctly identifying the right markets to target at each stage of fuel cell technology maturity: it started with backup power, expanded in low-carbon, quick deployment, low-footprint power supply, and quickly pivoted toward AI, landing massive partnerships with leading companies like Oracle and Brookfield.
The same technology will be able to effortlessly switch fuel from natural gas to biogas or hydrogen, making it a likely winner from future, more stringent carbon emissions requirements for power generation.
The company also holds key patents and industrial capacity in solid-oxide electrolyzer technology, which might become increasingly important in green hydrogen production.
Overall, no matter its long-term outcome, the turning point of the AI boom will likely have given Bloom Energy the scale and profitability it needed to become a more mature power generation company, making it an essential part of our future energy mix in the coming decades, irrespective of AI-specific uncertainties.
Latest Bloom Energy (BE) Stock News and Developments
