Two firms are teaming up on a $1.7 billion project investment to deploy Bloom Energy's fuel cell technology for the buildout of artificial-intelligence cloud infrastructure.
The firms, Industrial Development Funding and Oaktree Capital Management, said Thursday the project will provide behind-the-meter power to AI cloud infrastructure provider Nebius to meet demand for compute capacity. Nebius selected Bloom to support the performance and availability demands of AI workloads, the firms said.
IDF is the lead developer of the Nebius project, with minority equity participation from Oaktree.
The investment comes as behind-the-meter power - generating electricity directly on site, rather than plugging into the power grid - becomes key for new data center capacity, according to Melius Research analysts. The analysts said the rise of behind-the-meter has been driven by demand for more immediate, gigawatt-scale power, which traditional regulated utilities can't provide.
"Private credit and infrastructure funds are now underwriting gigawatt-scale gas turbine and fuel cell fleets on multi-year timelines that regulated utilities cannot match through the traditional rate case process," the analysts said in a note.
Bloom Energy said the investment shows how institutional capital can help accelerate the build-out of AI infrastructure.
"AI infrastructure customers need more than innovative technology," said Bloom Energy's Chief Commercial Officer Aman Joshi. "They also need a path to finance and deploy power rapidly."
Write to Kelly Cloonan at kelly.cloonan@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
July 16, 2026 13:22 ET (17:22 GMT)
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