Overview
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 operated at a loss and faced persistent skepticism about whether fuel cells could compete on cost with the grid. Revenue rose sharply starting in FY2025 as AI data center operators bought on-site power. Bloom says its fuel cells produce 800V DC directly, which matches Nvidia's GPU power architecture and removes an AC-to-DC conversion step that conventional generators require. Revenue reached $2.02 billion in FY2025, up 37% from the prior year, and first-quarter 2026 revenue more than doubled year over year to $751 million on data center deployments. As of June 2026 the market cap was about $72 billion, on a stock that has ranged from roughly $22 to $351 over the prior year.
Technology
Data center demand
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 can delay utility grid access by years, and reliability requirements operators say the grid does not routinely meet. Bloom positions fuel cells as an answer to 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, which Bloom called the largest single customer commitment in its history. American Electric Power agreed to procure up to 1 GW of Bloom capacity (about $2.65 billion), structured as a 100 MW firm order plus an option for 900 MW more. In April 2026, Bloom and Oracle expanded their master agreement to up to 2.8 GW, with about 1.2 GW contracted, to power Oracle's AI infrastructure. In May 2026, Bloom signed a roughly $2.6 billion, 10-year agreement with Nebius for about 328 MW. Other customers include Intel, Equinix, and Quanta Computer, which expanded its existing installation by more than 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.
Korea and international
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 totaling about 80 MW, which Bloom called the largest single-site fuel cell installation to date, with operations targeted for around 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 1.5 GW installed across more than 1,200 locations. 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.
Financials
Bloom reported $2.02 billion in FY2025 revenue, up 37.3% from $1.47 billion in FY2024, its highest annual revenue to date. 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 shift to data center demand brought the company to its first GAAP-profitable quarter in Q1 2026.