For 25 years, Bloom Energy has been chasing one big idea, reimagining how the world generates power. Today, that vision has made it one of Silicon Valley's most closely watched clean tech companies with a market capitalization of over $80 billion and a stock that has surged more than 1,200% over the past year. As the AI boom fuels an unprecedented demand for power, Bloom Energy finds itself at the heart of the conversation on energy security, data centers, and the future of electricity. Its fuel cell technology is already powering some of the world's largest enterprises, and now the next phase of growth could be even bigger.
You know, we were last year in 2016, and so much has changed for Bloom Energy since then, and so much has changed for the world that we live in.
Absolutely. So, what AI has done is catalyzed a revolution we saw coming 25 years ago.
Our thesis was the world is going from a mechanical industrial age to a digital age. Everything is good transforming to dependence on digital technology. And what does digital run on? Electricity. So, for the first time in human history, unlike heat energy being the predominant need for energy to keep yourself warm and to cook your food so you don't get poisoned, electricity becomes the main staple of energy. That was our thesis, and we said digital electricity for a digital world is going to be required. And what is digital electricity? It is not a gas turbine or an engine
that first heats the fuel, creates a fire, combustion.
That heat energy then runs a turbine, it becomes mechanical energy, you put big copper coils around it to convert the mechanical energy to electrical energy. Then you have freeways or highways and surface streets called transmission and distribution.
So, before you get your electricity when you flip a switch, what was happening was fuel is being consumed to make heat,
chemical energy to heat energy, to mechanical energy, to electrical energy, to highways, yeah, to distribution streets. We said that's nonsense. You need to be able to make clean electricity from a molecule to electricity with no middleman
who are all going to take their share and make this whole equation inefficient.
And do that in a clean way right where you consume the electricity.
This was the Bloom thesis
25 years ago because internet 1.0 had just happened. And we saw where the world was going ahead with Moore's law and this continuous learning and digitalization.
But did you anticipate this kind of power demand?
We anticipated an extremely large energy demand. So, if you look at our mission statement, it was affordable power for everybody on the planet. Look, I'm an abundance guy. For some people, the glass is half full. For some people, the glass is half empty. For me, it's always overflowing because if I drink the half in the glass, somebody is going to pour for another half. So, for me it's about abundance, right? So, I always envision the world to be this place where there's abundance of electricity.
But, even I did not anticipate the extreme rate at which this growth in electricity demand is going to happen, which is predominantly being triggered by AI. And we can talk about it, right?
We do want to talk about it. I mean, visualization is going to probably help people understand this better. When we talk about the surging power demand, the explosion that we're likely to see on account of all of this build out that's happening linked to AI, what are we talking about?
So, first and foremost, right? How exciting is this? For the first time in human history, we are manufacturing intelligence as a product, as a commodity. That's amazing. What it's going to do for the wellness of people all over the world and uplift lives in the long term. That's pretty amazing. That's exciting. But, manufacturing intelligence, unlike a factory that manufactures chemicals or materials, what's the input?
All the data that's out there and electricity. That's it. The machines are the GPU chips.
The output is intelligence. And there is no higher value product electricity would have created than intelligence. So, the value is very high. So, but then, how does it actually happen? So, these computer racks that are in big data centers, they're about the size of a big Godrej safe.
That everybody in India understands. Yeah. That everybody in India has, right? That safe with the CPU chips, which the previous generation of great IT data centers that we're all familiar with would consume about 13 kilowatt hours per rack, 13 kilowatt per rack. 13 kilowatts will be roughly maybe 20 Indian homes. Today's GPU chips in that same Godrej safe size unit would consume more than 300 homes worth of power. And the chips that are being built 2 years and 3 years from now will probably require 2,000 to 3,000 homes worth of power in that one Godrej safe and there are thousands of these Godrej safes in a single data center. How do you bring all this power into a data center? And how do you create that much electricity? And by the way, think about this. That factory is producing all this intelligence for a reason. It's going to make every other factory making everything else a lot more productive, a lot more efficient. It's going to allow us to do things in hospitals, in other places, in research centers that we could never do. They all need one or two of these Godrej safes sitting everywhere. They're sitting in every laboratory, in every building needing 3,000 homes worth of power coming into that. So, it's an explosion of demand and that's what's creating this need.
You know, thank you for giving us that visualization of the kind of demand explosion that we're likely to see and that is why people are excited about what Bloom Energy is doing. Now, talk to us about what it means to actually be able to cater to that kind of demand. It's being reflected in your numbers. I mean, we've seen record numbers as far as your financial performance is concerned. But, what does it mean to be able to deliver to that consistently?
Great question. So, when you have that large a demand of power needed in one single place, the only way to produce that power is right where you need that power, not producing it somewhere else and bringing it over. Onsite power. That's very clear and it should be clear even from the industrial age. Very large petrochemical plants, very large cement factories, they produce their own power. They didn't depend on the grid because the grid only brings power to spread it out to lots of people, not for a single concentrated use. So, onsite power. Once you get to onsite power, countries like India should learn from what we are already facing in the US. The initial thought was we could use the grid. When you use the grid, very quickly you find out that the grid is not meant to support those kind of very large loads that can go up and down and create instability in the grid, so reliability goes down. If 95% of all the freeways and surface streets like we talked about transmission distribution is being used by a single customer, then everybody else should not pay the toll and if they did, the rates for all of these people are going up and that's going to create a backlash.
