Brookfield Asset Management will invest up to $5 billion in the fuel cell-maker Bloom Energy, as part of a “strategic AI infrastructure partnership,” the two companies announced yesterday.
“Behind-the-meter power solutions are essential to closing the grid gap for AI factories,” Sikander Rashid, Brookfield’s global head of AI infrastructure, said in a statement.
Bloom and Brookfield ultimately plan to build AI factories capable of meeting the industry’s growing demand for compute; this deal marks the “first phase” of their partnership. They are currently collaborating to design and deploy those factories, including a site in Europe that they plan to announce before the end of the year.
The announcement is short on details, but according to a client note from Jefferies about the deal, investor confidence in Bloom “hinges on visibility into 2027 sales and capacity plans.” Brookfield has historically invested over $100 billion in digital infrastructure, though this is the asset manager’s first investment under its dedicated AI infrastructure strategy. According to a report published in August, the company estimates that total spending on infrastructure for AI “will exceed $1 trillion this decade and $7 trillion in the next 10 years.”
It’s a turn that Brookfield has been making for nearly a year — in parallel with the broader rise of AI infrastructure as an asset class. On an earnings call last November, president Connor Teskey listed it as a key focus area, and said the firm was mulling creating a dedicated fund.
Bloom, meanwhile, has seemingly found its footing in the AI boom, after trying to pitch its fuel cells as an option for decarbonizing power. Data centers have long been a major customer for the company’s behind-the-meter fuel cells — which currently still run primarily on gas (which can be paired with carbon capture and sequestration) but are compatible with hydrogen — and in recent years Bloom has made deals with customers like the utility AEP, the data center company Equinix, and cloud company Oracle.
Bloom’s expansion in recent years has been fueled by load growth, which CEO KR Sridhar told Latitude Media in a 2024 interview is “faster and more hectic than we’ve ever seen before.” And while data centers remain a major customer segment, Sridhar added that competition with data centers has led to competition from other large power users as well.
While neither company has been explicit about Bloom’s plans for capacity expansion, Jefferies said that it would be required to “support the narrative” of the deal. The investment advisor said that consensus estimates for Bloom’s 2026 sales is 500 megawatts, and that 2027 sales could be around 1.35 gigawatts — assuming, that is, that 90% of 2027 capacity is already sold.
The surge in demand comes as the industry shifts from only very rarely relying on onsite power, like fuel cells and other behind-the-meter options, to doing so as a matter of course given long waits to secure a grid connection. According to a survey by Bloom, in 2024 just 1% of data centers planned to run entirely on onsite power by 2030; this year, the share has soared to 27%.
