Is the future of electricity supply for artificial intelligence cloud computing going to come from fuel cells?
What’s happening:
- Bloom Energy (NYSE: BE) has announced a new deal with American Electric Power (NASDAQ: AEP) to leverage their fuel cell technology to provide electricity to data centres being used for artificial intelligence workloads
By the numbers:
- American Electric Power will initially purchase 100 megawatts of power from Bloom Energy’s products with the potential to purchase up to 1 gigawatt of power
- The deal could eventually generate up to $3B USD in equipment revenue for Bloom Energy
Why it matters:
- The new deal between Bloom Energy and American Electric Power represents the largest purchase of fuel cells ever for commercial purposes
Going deeper:
- Data centre operators have been cutting all sorts of deals around renewable energy recently, including Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) previously leading the Series C financing round for small modular reactor startup X-energy and Sam Altman backed Oklo (NYSE: OKLO) just recently cutting a deal with two data centre operators to provide nuclear power supply
Market reaction:
- Shares of Bloom Energy have surged more than +70% since the announcement
The intrigue:
- Bloom Energy also just recently entered into a collaboration with Korean renewable energy giant ST Eternix for the largest single-site fuel cell installation ever, which will be located in South Korea
