Bloom Energy makes solid oxide fuel cells that generate electricity from natural gas, hydrogen, or biogas through electrochemical conversion rather than combustion. The company was founded in 2001 as Ion America by K.R. Sridhar, a professor who directed the Space Technologies Laboratory at the University of Arizona. Sridhar had been working on a NASA program to convert Martian atmospheric gases into oxygen and fuel using solid oxide electrolyzer technology. When NASA shifted away from Mars surface missions, Sridhar applied the same science to power generation on Earth and founded the company with funding from Kleiner Perkins and New Enterprise Associates. Ion America was renamed Bloom Energy in 2006, shipped its first commercial units to Google in 2008, and went public on the NYSE in July 2018.
For most of its first two decades, Bloom was a story of expensive technology and slow commercialization. The company burned through capital, operated at a loss, and faced persistent skepticism about whether fuel cells could compete on cost with the grid. The AI data center buildout changed that dynamic sharply. Data centers need large amounts of reliable, on-site power that the grid cannot reliably deliver at scale, and Bloom's fuel cells produce 800V DC directly, which matches Nvidia's GPU architecture without the AC-to-DC conversion step conventional generators require. Revenue hit $2.02 billion in FY2025, up 37% from the prior year. Q1 2026 revenue came in at $751 million, up 130% year over year, driven by data center deployments. As of May 2026, the market cap is approximately $82 billion.
A Bloom Energy Server uses a stack of ceramic wafers made from yttria-stabilized zirconia, coated with proprietary conductive ink. The cells operate at around 800°C. At that temperature, oxygen ions from the air pass through the solid ceramic electrolyte and react electrochemically with fuel on the other side, releasing electrons and producing electricity. The process generates no combustion, which means very low nitrogen oxide and particulate emissions compared to a gas turbine or diesel generator. Efficiency is higher than combustion alternatives because the conversion skips the thermodynamic losses of burning fuel to make heat to spin a turbine. The fuel can be natural gas, biogas, or hydrogen, or any blend. Bloom's units are "fuel flexible" in the sense that they can run on whatever mix is available, and the company has positioned this as a path toward green hydrogen as that supply develops.
Bloom's fuel cells produce electricity as direct current at a voltage that aligns with Nvidia's 800V DC GPU power architecture. A conventional data center power chain runs: grid AC, step down, rectify to DC, condition, deliver to servers. Each conversion step loses energy. Bloom's systems deliver 800V DC to the rack with fewer conversion steps, which the company estimates reduces electrical losses and can cut power delivery costs by roughly 15%. Bloom announced that all product shipments are now 800V DC ready as of FY2025. The Energy Server is modular; sites can be configured from 20 MW to 500 MW and beyond by adding units, which makes it practical for hyperscale data center campuses. As of early 2026, Bloom has deployed over 400 MW to data centers worldwide.
The same solid oxide cell that generates electricity can be run in reverse to split water and produce hydrogen. Bloom began producing solid oxide electrolyzers at its Delaware manufacturing facility in November 2022. The company says its SOEC achieves 20-25% better efficiency than proton exchange membrane or alkaline electrolyzers because it operates at high temperature, where the thermodynamics of water splitting are more favorable. Bloom's SOEC program is early-stage relative to the core fuel cell business, but it represents an option on the hydrogen economy if green hydrogen supply and demand develop.
The core driver of Bloom's FY2025 and FY2026 growth is AI data center demand for on-site power. Data centers building out GPU clusters face two problems: interconnection queues that delay utility grid access by years, and reliability requirements that exceed what the grid routinely provides. Fuel cells address both. They can be installed on-site and permitted faster than transmission infrastructure, they produce power continuously, and they do not depend on grid stability.
In October 2025, Brookfield Asset Management committed up to $5 billion to deploy Bloom fuel cells at AI data centers, representing the largest single customer commitment in the company's history and adding institutional capital to accelerate deployments. American Electric Power (AEP) committed to 1 GW of Bloom capacity. Other customers include Oracle, Intel, Equinix, and Quanta Computers, which expanded its deployment by 150%. Product backlog grew roughly 2.5x year over year in FY2025, reaching approximately $6 billion.
Q1 2026 revenue came in at $751 million, up 130% from Q1 2025's $326 million, with product revenue up 208%. The company turned its first GAAP-profitable quarter, reporting $70.7 million in net income. Bloom raised its FY2026 guidance to $3.4-3.8 billion in revenue with approximately 34% non-GAAP gross margin and $600-750 million in non-GAAP operating income. The company is expanding manufacturing capacity from 1 GW to 2 GW per year by the end of 2026.
South Korea is Bloom's most developed international market. SK ecoplant, a subsidiary of SK Group, has been Bloom's primary distribution partner in Korea for several years and is a significant shareholder. In November 2024, Bloom and SK Eternix announced a partnership to power two eco-parks in Chungju, described as the largest fuel cell installation in history, with operations targeted for spring 2026. In late 2025, SK ecoplant provided a $100 million shareholder loan to support Bloom's manufacturing scale-up.
Beyond Korea, Bloom has deployments in the UK, Europe, and India, with roughly 1.4 GW installed across 1,000-plus locations in nine countries. Korea has historically represented a meaningful share of that international volume, driven by South Korean industrial demand for on-site power and favorable government policy for fuel cells.
Bloom reported $2.02 billion in FY2025 revenue, up 37.3% from $1.47 billion in FY2024, marking the company's highest annual revenue since founding. GAAP gross margin was 29.0%, up 1.6 percentage points from 2024. The company posted a GAAP net loss of $88.4 million for FY2025, driven by interest expense on its debt load, but achieved $198 million in non-GAAP net income. Operating cash flow was $113.9 million, the second consecutive year of positive operating cash flow. The company ended 2025 with $2.45 billion in cash after a $2.2 billion convertible note issuance and a $600 million revolving credit facility established during the year. Recourse debt stands at $2.61 billion.
Before the AI data center cycle, Bloom operated unprofitably for roughly 19 years, raising over $1 billion in venture capital (led by Kleiner Perkins and NEA) before its NYSE IPO in July 2018. The company's IPO prospectus stated explicitly that it did not expect near-term profitability. The combination of a specific technology match with data center power architecture and the scale of the AI buildout has compressed what might have been a decade-long commercialization path into two or three years.