shares of bloom energy It soared on Monday after signing a deal with Brookfield Asset Management to install fuel cells in an artificial intelligence data center.
Brookfield plans to invest up to $5 billion in Bloom Energy’s technology, the first investment in the company’s strategy to support large-scale AI data centers with power and computing infrastructure. Bloom’s fuel cells are “fuel flexible” and can run on natural gas, biogas or hydrogen, the company said.
Brookfield and Bloom are collaborating to design and build what they call “AI factories” around the world, including a European site that will go live by the end of the year.
Bloom Energy’s stock price rose more than 20%. Bloom’s fuel cells provide on-site power that is quick to install and does not rely on connection to the power grid.
Bloom has already installed hundreds of megawatts of fuel cells through deals with utilities such as: american power power and data center developers etc. Equinix and oracleaccording to the company.
The AI industry’s data center plans are expanding in size. Nvidia For example, OpenAI recently announced a partnership to build a 10 gigawatt data center, equivalent to the power consumption of New York City in midsummer.
But the AI company’s plan seeks to compete with the aging U.S. power grid, where additional power supplies are often delayed. Data centers also threaten to raise electricity prices for residential customers.
Sikander Rashid, Brookfield’s global head of AI infrastructure, said in a release announcing the deal that deploying power solutions “behind the meter,” or off-grid, “is essential to closing the grid gap for AI factories.”
“AI infrastructure must be built like a factory, with purpose, speed, and scale,” said KR Sridhar, CEO of Bloom Energy, in a release.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC last week that the artificial intelligence industry needs to quickly respond to demand and build power off the grid to protect consumers from rising power prices.
“Home-generated power in data centers can be migrated much faster than connecting to the grid, and we need to do that,” Huang said.
