Bloom Energy shares soar more than 30% after striking deal with Brookfield to provide fuel cells to AI data centers

shares Blooming Energy AI rose on Monday following a deal with Brookfield to deploy fuel cells for data centers.

Brookfield will spend up to $5 billion to deploy Bloom Energy’s technology, the first investment in its strategy to support large AI data centers with power and computing infrastructure.

Shares of Bloom Energy rose more than 30% in early trading. Bloom’s fuel cells provide on-site power that can be deployed quickly because they are not connected to the electrical grid.

Bloom already has deployed hundreds of megawatts of fuel cells through agreements with utility companies such as American Electric Power and data center developers such as Equinix and Oracle, the company said.

The AI ​​industry’s data center plans are growing in scale. For example, Nvidia and OpenAI recently announced a partnership that aims to build 10 gigawatt data centers, equivalent to the power New York City consumes on some days during the summer months.

But the AI ​​companies’ plans are at odds with the aging U.S. power grid, which is often slow to provide additional power capacity. Data centers also threaten to exacerbate rising electricity prices for consumers.

Deploying power solutions “behind the meter” or off-grid is “vital to close the grid gap for AI factories,” said Sikander Rashid, global head of AI infrastructure at Brookfield.

“AI infrastructure must be built with purpose, speed and scale like a factory,” said KR Sridhar, CEO of Bloom Energy.

The AI ​​industry will need to generate power from electricity to quickly meet demand and protect consumers from rising electricity prices, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC last week.

“The power that the data center generates itself can move much faster than putting it into the grid, and we have to do that,” Huang told CNBC on Oct. 8.

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