Bloom Energy rockets after Brookfield inks up-to-$5B deal to power AI “factories”

Bloom Energy just caught a monster tailwind. The fuel-cell maker’s stock jumped more than 20% Monday after Brookfield Asset Management said it will spend up to $5 billion deploying Bloom’s systems to power artificial-intelligence data centers around the world.

Here’s why that matters. AI data centers are exploding in size and power needs, but the US grid is congested and slow to add capacity. Bloom’s boxes generate on-site, “behind-the-meter” electricity — no new transmission lines, no waiting on utility interconnects — so operators can stand up compute far faster. The units are “fuel-flexible,” running on natural gas today and biogas or hydrogen as those supplies scale.

Brookfield, which is building a portfolio of power and compute assets for the AI boom, called Bloom its preferred on-site power provider and said the two are co-designing a new class of “AI factories.” The first European site will be unveiled before year-end.

“Behind-the-meter power solutions are essential to closing the grid gap for AI factories,” said Sikander Rashid, Brookfield’s global head of AI infrastructure.

Bloom CEO KR Sridhar put it bluntly:

“AI infrastructure must be built like a factory — with purpose, speed, and scale.”

This is a space where demand is running hot. Nvidia and OpenAI recently outlined plans for 10 gigawatts of new data centers — roughly New York City’s peak summer load. Even Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has been telling anyone who’ll listen that hyperscalers will have to build power off-grid to keep up — and to avoid dumping higher electricity costs on households.

Bloom isn’t starting from zero. The company says it already has hundreds of megawatts installed with utilities and data-center developers like American Electric Power, Equinix and Oracle. Monday’s Brookfield pact formalizes a much bigger pipeline, and Wall Street noticed: shares ripped higher, with analysts highlighting a step-change in potential AI-driven orders.

The takeaway: the AI arms race isn’t just about chips and servers — it’s about energy. With grid queues years long, fast, local power has become the killer feature. Brookfield gets a flexible toolkit for rolling out capacity; Bloom gets deep-pocketed demand. And investors just got a fresh reminder that in the AI era, watts are as strategic as FLOPs.

With input from CNBC, Bloomberg, and Investor’s Business Daily.