Bloom Energy power storage equipment in San Ramon, California.
Smith Collection | Gado | Archive Photos | Getty Images
Shares of Bloom Energy surged Monday after striking a deal with Brookfield to deploy fuel cells for artificial intelligence data centers.
Brookfield will spend up to $5 billion to deploy Bloom Energy’s technology, the first investment in its strategy to support big AI data centers with power and computing infrastructure.
Brookfield and Bloom are collaborating to design and build what they are calling “AI factories” around the the world, including a site in Europe that will be unveiled before the end of the year.
Shares of Bloom Energy were up more than 30% in early trading. Bloom’s fuel cells provide onsite power that can be deployed quickly because they do not rely on a connection to the electric grid.
Bloom has already deployed hundreds of megawatts of fuel cells through deals with utilities like American Electric Power and data centers developers like Equinix and Oracle, according to the company.
The AI industry’s data center plans are growing in scale. Nvidia and OpenAI, for example, recently announced a partnership that aims to build 10 gigawatts of data centers, equivalent to the power consumed by New York City on some days during the summer.
But AI companies’ plans are butting up against an ageing U.S. electric grid that is often slow to deploy additional power capacity. Data centers also threatening to exacerbate rising electricity prices for consumers.
Deploying power solutions “behind-the-meter,” or off the grid, “are essential to closing the grid gap for AI factories,” said Brookfield’s global head of AI infrastructure Sikander Rashid.
“AI infrastructure must be built like a factory—with purpose, speed, and scale,” Bloom Energy CEO KR Sridhar said.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC last week that the AI industry will need to build power off the electric to meet demand quickly and protect consumers from rising electricity prices.
“Data center self-generated power could move a lot faster than putting it on the grid and we have to do that,” Huang told CNBC on Oct. 8.
