The company was founded in 2001 Bloom traces its roots to the work of KR Sridhar who created a technology to convert
Martian atmospheric gases to oxygen for propulsion and life support, using a
solid oxide fuel cell electrolyzer (SOEC), while director of the Space Technologies Laboratory at the
University of Arizona. Sridhar and his team built an electrochemical cell for
NASA that is capable of producing air and fuel from electricity generated by a
solar panel. Bloom shipped its first 5 kW (kilowatt) unit to the
University of Tennessee, where two years of field trials conducted in three U.S. states validated the technology. The first 100 kW commercial units, ES-5000 Energy Servers, The company worked in secret for eight years before coming out of
stealth mode in February 2010, supported by political figures and named one of 26 "2010 Tech Pioneers" by the
World Economic Forum. The Bloom Box generator was also chosen among
Time "Best 50 Inventions of 2010". In 2011, the company also began selling electricity produced by Bloom Energy Servers, rather than selling the units themselves, underwriting manufacture of the fuel cells. as the state focused its subsidies on batteries. then producing about one Bloom Box per day, until opening a factory in
Newark, Delaware, in April 2012. By 2013, it had raised $1.1 billion in funding, which was followed by additional funding rounds, in 2014 and 2015. in some years losing more than $200 million. Federal subsidies that had expired in 2016 were restored in 2018. Later that year, Bloom moved headquarters from
Sunnyvale to San Jose. By 2020, shares had lost nearly 50% in value. Though not profitable in its first 19 years of operation, the company had raised over $1.7 billion in capital for its technology. In July 2019,
Duke Energy corporation announced the intention of acquiring a 37 MW portfolio of distributed
SOFC technology projects from Bloom Energy. later reselling the distributed fuel-cell projects managed by Bloom to ArcLight Capital Partners, in October 2023. In 2020, in preparation of a possible critical demand for ventilators during the
COVID-19 pandemic; Bloom pivoted its operation to repair and refurbish ventilators for the state of
California. and helped provide a mobile vaccination clinic to about 80,000 individuals. After generating hydrogen from its
SOEC at NASA’s
Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, in November 2022, Bloom Energy's
Delaware factory began manufacturing its high-volume commercial
electrolyzer, the largest and most efficient in the world to date, producing 20-25% more hydrogen per MW than either
proton exchange membrane (PEM) or
alkaline electrolyzers. In November 2024, Bloom Energy partnered with SK Eternix to power two
Eco Parks with Bloom SOFCs by Spring 2026, in
Chungju,
North Chungcheong Province,
South Korea, the largest fuel cell installation in history. The same month, the company agreed to expand its existing SOFC installation with Quanta Computers by 150%, in order to power critical
artificial intelligence (AI) industry hardware, and was contracted by
American Electric Power (AEP) to provide a GW of fuel cell capacity to industrial customers on-site, supporting an increasing demand for energy to fuel the needs of data centers, especially those powering AI. In February 2025, digital infrastructure company
Equinix increased its Bloom contract to exceed 100 MW of combined electricity to power its International Business Exchange (IBX) data centers throughout the U.S. That month, the company also entered a
carbon capture partnership with Chart Industries to provide low-emission, always-on, near zero-carbon power using natural gas and
carbon sequestration technology for high-energy consumption industries, to meet the increasing demands of
AI and
cryptocurrency. ==Products and services==