By Avi Salzman
Bloom Energy's latest earnings report cemented its status as a major data-center power player, highlighting how it isn't a niche clean-energy company anymore. The maker of fuel cells is aiming to take market share from companies such as GE Vernova, the big dogs of power production.
Bloom Energy stock rose 2% in early trading Friday as investors parsed its fourth-quarter financial results, disclosed late Thursday. Both earnings and revenue beat expectations.
And while Bloom finished 2025 with $2 billion in annual revenue, the company projected $3.1 to $3.3 billion in 2026. Management forecast between $1.33 and $1.48 in adjusted earnings per share, ahead of analysts' expectations for $1.29.
"We are encouraged that the 2026 trajectory begins to exhibit a significant acceleration in revenue growth," wrote Morgan Stanley analyst David Arcaro. He sees more upside for the shares, given the potential for Bloom to sign new data-center deals this year.
That said, the stock has already priced in quite a bit of growth. Bloom is up more than 250% in the past six months, and trades at over 100 times its expected 2026 earnings.
Bloom CEO KR Sridhar made it clear on the company's earnings call late Thursday that Bloom considers its products -- fuel cells that turn natural gas into electricity through a chemical reaction -- to be better options than the natural-gas turbines that power the lion's share of America's electricity today. And Bloom is now operating at significant scale.
"We are no longer that 10 megawatt and 20 megawatt systems," Sridhar said. "We have hundreds of megawatts, going into the gigawatts very soon."
"So very clearly, it's in the same category of a combined cycle gas turbine," he added.
Bloom is winning orders from data-center players like Oracle and utilities like American Electric Power. Its fuel cells are much smaller than turbines, and can operate on the site of a data-center campus. They also are designed to produce 800 volts of direct current, which is expected to become the standard for AI data-center power. Other power sources still feed into alternating current systems at different voltages.
If Bloom can take market share from natural-gas turbine players like GE Vernova and Siemens Energy, its market opportunity will grow well beyond the $3 billion in revenue it expects to make this year. Sales of natural-gas turbines for power plants are worth $30 billion or so annually, and potentially much more.
Today, Bloom's factory can produce one gigawatt of capacity a year, about as much as a nuclear reactor, but it expects to double capacity before the end of the year.
Still, the company needs to watch its own back. GE Vernova said last month that it is getting into a new game: fuel cells.
Write to Avi Salzman at avi.salzman@barrons.com
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February 06, 2026 11:09 ET (16:09 GMT)
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