Bloom Energy Corp

The company was founded in 2001 as Ion America, then was renamed Bloom Energy in 2006. Bloom traces its roots to the work of KR Sridhar who created a technology to convert Martian atmospheric gases to oxygen for propulsion and life support, using a solid oxide fuel cell electrolyzer (SOEC), while director of the Space Technologies Laboratory at the University of Arizona. Sridhar and his team built an electrochemical cell for NASA that is capable of producing air and fuel from electricity generated by a solar panel. Bloom shipped its first 5 kW (kilowatt) unit to the University of Tennessee, where two years of field trials conducted in three U.S. states validated the technology. The first 100 kW commercial units, ES-5000 Energy Servers, were shipped to Google in July 2008.

The company worked in secret for eight years before coming out of stealth mode in February 2010, and introducing its Bloom Energy Server, or "Bloom Box", a fuel-cell technology that enables on-site carbon-neutral electricity generation. Bloom Energy was featured on 60 Minutes, supported by political figures and named one of 26 "2010 Tech Pioneers" by the World Economic Forum. The Bloom Box generator was also chosen among Time 's "Best 50 Inventions of 2010". The company raised $400 million in funding that year, and had 300 employees. The San Francisco Chronicle later reported that Bloom had "a coming-out party packed with politicians and Silicon Valley elite".

In 2011, the company also began selling electricity produced by Bloom Energy Servers, rather than selling the units themselves, underwriting manufacture of the fuel cells. A federal subsidy for fuel cells expired in 2016, and the California Self-Generation Incentive Program was discontinued the following year, as the state focused its subsidies on batteries.

Bloom was valued at $2.9 billion in 2011, then producing about one Bloom Box per day, until opening a factory in Newark, Delaware, in April 2012. By 2013, it had raised $1.1 billion in funding, which was followed by additional funding rounds, in 2014 and 2015. Company revenues grew rapidly, though its development phase was unprofitable, in some years losing more than $200 million.

Federal subsidies that had expired in 2016 were restored in 2018. Bloom Energy filed an IPO that July, stating that it did not expect to be profitable in the near future, and disclosing a legal settlement with some of its investors. Later that year, Bloom moved headquarters from Sunnyvale to San Jose. By 2020, shares had lost nearly 50% in value. Though not profitable in its first 19 years of operation, the company had raised over $1.7 billion in capital for its technology. In July 2019, Duke Energy corporation announced the intention of acquiring a 37 MW portfolio of distributed SOFC technology projects from Bloom Energy. later reselling the distributed fuel-cell projects managed by Bloom to ArcLight Capital Partners, in October 2023.

In 2020, in preparation of a possible critical demand for ventilators during the COVID-19 pandemic; Bloom pivoted its operation to repair and refurbish ventilators for the state of California. and helped provide a mobile vaccination clinic to about 80,000 individuals. After generating hydrogen from its SOEC at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, with 20–25% more efficiency than traditional methods; in November 2022, Bloom Energy's Delaware factory began manufacturing its high-volume commercial electrolyzer, the largest and most efficient in the world to date, producing 20-25% more hydrogen per MW than either proton exchange membrane (PEM) or alkaline electrolyzers.

In November 2024, Bloom Energy partnered with SK Eternix to power two Eco Parks with Bloom SOFCs by Spring 2026, in Chungju, North Chungcheong Province, South Korea, the largest fuel cell installation in history. The same month, the company agreed to expand its existing SOFC installation with Quanta Computers by 150%, in order to power critical artificial intelligence (AI) industry hardware, and was contracted by American Electric Power (AEP) to provide a GW of fuel cell capacity to industrial customers on-site, supporting an increasing demand for energy to fuel the needs of data centers, especially those powering AI.

In February 2025, digital infrastructure company Equinix increased its Bloom contract to exceed 100 MW of combined electricity to power its International Business Exchange (IBX) data centers throughout the U.S. That month, the company also entered a carbon capture partnership with Chart Industries to provide low-emission, always-on, near zero-carbon power using natural gas and carbon sequestration technology for high-energy consumption industries, to meet the increasing demands of AI and cryptocurrency.

In April 2026, Bloom Energy and Oracle announced a partnership for 2.8 gigawatts of Bloom Energy's fuel cell capacity. This would include Project Jupiter, a 2.45 gigawatt data center in Doña Ana County, New Mexico, powered entirely by Bloom Energy's products. Oracle claimed that this partnership would "dramatically reduce water use" compared to using a previously planned natural gas power plant.

In July 2026, Bloom Energy reported record quarterly revenue of $1.07 billion (up 165% year-over-year), raised full-year 2026 revenue guidance to $3.9 to $4.2 billion, and disclosed a total backlog of approximately $20 billion including product backlog approaching $6billion.