Bloom Energy

Who they are

Bloom Energy's origin story is genuinely unusual for a power company: founder KR Sridhar developed the core solid oxide technology while working on a NASA project to generate oxygen from the Martian atmosphere, then realized the same electrochemical process could be run in reverse on Earth to generate electricity from natural gas or hydrogen. He founded the company in 2001 as Ion America, renamed it Bloom Energy in 2006, and kept it in stealth mode for nearly a decade before unveiling the "Bloom Box" publicly in 2010, with Google as an early adopter dating back to 2008. Bloom went public on the NYSE in July 2018 and Sridhar remains founder, chairman, and CEO today.

What they do

Bloom builds modular solid oxide fuel cell ("Energy Server") systems that generate electricity on-site, at the customer's location, without needing a new grid connection — which is exactly the constraint that's currently delaying AI data centers everywhere. Each 65-kilowatt module runs independently, so a bank of them provides built-in redundancy. The company has roughly 1.4 gigawatts deployed across more than 1,000 sites in nine countries, and it's targeting a doubling of annual production capacity to 2 gigawatts by the end of 2026, driven almost entirely by hyperscaler data center demand. Its newest generation of Energy Servers is "800V DC-ready," meaning it can plug directly into modern AI server racks without an extra conversion step.

How Bloom Energy makes money

Equipment sales and long-term service agreements, increasingly anchored by very large, named enterprise deals rather than a long tail of small ones. Oracle alone signed a master services agreement covering up to 2.8 gigawatts (expanded in April 2026), with an initial 1.2 gigawatts already contracted and deploying. Equinix has more than 100 megawatts across roughly 19 of its IBX colocation facilities under a relationship that started as a single 1-megawatt pilot back in 2015. American Electric Power has contracted Bloom for a full gigawatt of on-site capacity for industrial customers, including power supporting Amazon Web Services demand, and "neocloud" operator CoreWeave runs Bloom fuel cells at one of its Illinois sites. In Korea, Bloom partnered with SK ecoplant/SK eternix to power Eco Parks in Chungju, described as the largest fuel cell installation in history when it comes online.

The bigger trend

Sridhar has described the current moment as a "once-in-a-generation opportunity to redefine how power is generated and delivered," and Bloom's sales playbook leans on landing one credible "lighthouse" customer per market segment to unlock the rest — Oracle for hyperscalers, AEP for utilities, Equinix for colocation, CoreWeave for neoclouds — the same approach Sridhar says worked for Bloom in telecom a decade earlier, landing AT&T first. A February 2025 carbon-capture partnership with Chart Industries aims to make the natural-gas-fueled version of this pitch lower-emission, while a longer-term hydrogen transition remains the path to a much larger addressable market if green hydrogen costs keep falling.

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