Bloom Energy’s Stock Is Up 1,000% In A Year Because Its Fuel Cells Are Solving AI’s Data Center Power Problem

Bloom Energy showcases an array of its fuel cell energy server stacks that offer on-site, off-grid power to data centers and much more.

Aerospace engineer KR Sridhar always dreamed big: he used to work with NASA on technology to convert carbon dioxide into oxygen to support life on other planets or let humans breathe air on Mars. But as the Soviet Union fell and the space race slowed, Sridhar pivoted to providing clean energy technology for the rising global middle class.

He cofounded Ion America in 2001—renamed Bloom Energy five years later—with a focus on fuel cells that deliver cleaner, on-site, off-grid power. Fast forward to today’s AI race, and Bloom’s products just so happen to mesh with the needs of the data center boom that’s starving for massive power generation growth very quickly.

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Fuel cells can hypothetically bring power online for data centers in months, not years, because they do not have to wait for the backlog of gas-fired turbines or the long queue for grid interconnections.

Bloom’s stock price has spiked 1,000% in 12 months—its market cap is now about $28 billion, up from $2.5 billion a year ago. The company has signed big data center deals with Oracle, American Electric Power (AEP), Equinix, and Brookfield Asset Management, the latter of which is a $5 billion partnership announced Oct. 13 to power AI factories globally, including Europe.

Renewable wind and solar energy still have some intermittency issues, even with batteries. And a sufficient supply of gas-fired and nuclear power stations are several years away, Sridhar said. That’s why on-site fuel cells are the answer—both as a bridge and as a permanent power solution.

The company’s solid oxide fuel cells are a mature technology developed over two decades. Thus far, Bloom has deployed 1.5 gigawatts of fuel cells—enough to power 1.2 million homes—with demand mounting by the day. The goal is to deploy 10 gigawatts per year from its manufacturing hubs in Fremont, California, and Newark, Delaware.

Fuel cells have existed for years but lacked mainstream adoption due to high manufacturing costs. They require expensive precious metals, corrosive acids, or hard-to-contain molten materials. Bloom’s solid oxide fuel cells use lower-cost ceramics—no precious metals—and provide greater electrical efficiency, operating at temperatures above 800°C.

The cells convert natural gas, hydrogen, or biogas into electricity through a clean electrochemical process rather than combustion. The cells are zero-carbon if they use green hydrogen, but they’re still cleaner than gas turbines even if they use natural gas. And the fuel cells are modular, so they can ramp up or down, or be relocated to other data centers when grid power becomes available.

Sridhar acknowledged the long journey to get here. Bloom took seven years to develop the first commercial cells and another decade to bring costs down and improve efficiency. In the meantime, Bloom relied on early-adopter Fortune 100 customers willing to pay extra for cleaner power, including Google, Walmart, eBay, and FedEx.

For years, Bloom was hyped as a Silicon Valley unicorn, but in 2012 the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged an investment bank working with Bloom with using inflated numbers to mislead investors. Bloom was not accused of wrongdoing, and the company went public in 2018.

The technology works more affordably now since fuel cell microgrids qualify for tax credits from President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, said Marina Domingues, head of U.S. new energies research for Rystad Energy. She said they are comparable to the price of power from combined-cycle gas turbines, but fuel cells can come online more quickly and produce power more cleanly.

Much of the AI boom’s focus is on massive hyperscaler campuses in rural areas, such as OpenAI’s Stargate project in Abilene, Texas. But Sridhar insists fuel cells will become imperative as smaller data centers rise in urban areas closer to consumer demand.

Elham Akhavan, senior microgrid research analyst at Wood Mackenzie, said Bloom’s competitors—including FuelCell Energy, Doosan Group subsidiary HyAxiom, and Plug Power—offer different variations on the technology but have yet to scale up as much as Bloom.

As the technology advanced, the fuel cell sector repositioned itself from backup power to a primary power source—with the grid as the backup, Akhavan said.

Domingues added that Bloom has multiple advantages: a domestic manufacturing chain, a head start on competitors, and early relationships with the data center market. That allows competitive advantages against peers.

Bloom operated at a $29 million net loss in 2024, improved from roughly $300 million in 2023. It also lost $66 million in the first half of 2025, though Sridhar expects profitability soon.

“We’ve already done that part the last 20 years. We have the flywheel spinning already. Accelerating is going to take less and less energy,” he said.

Sridhar remains inspired by his Mars work: “Living off the land is what an explorer does. I started producing oxygen, water, electricity, and heat on Mars so someday humans can live there,” he said. On Earth, “Clean energy is what we need—reliable and accessible everywhere.”