Bloom's Big Lie

newsletter

home<br>team<br>about us<br>investigations<br>breaking news<br>contact<br>terms

get our free newsletter

Follow us

Bloom's Big Lie

Daniel DeLorenzo

July 8, 2026 12:59 PM<br>EST

BY:

Till Daldrup<br>Dhruv Patel<br>Jean Wang<br>Blake Spendley<br>Sam Koppelman

EDITOR:

Vikas Kumar

Based on Hunterbrook Media’s reporting, at the time of publication Hunterbrook Capital is short $BE including derivatives and long a basket of comparable securities, as well as long $NB including derivatives and short a basket of comparable securities. Positions will change. This article is not investment advice or a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security. See full disclosures below .

Bloom Energy is one of the AI boom's biggest winners. $BE is up about 2,000% in two years. Its valuation peaked around $100 billion. The vision: fuel cells powering AI data centers years faster than the electric grid, with Bloom saying it can scale from about a gigawatt of deployments in 2026 to 5 gigawatts annually. It’s a compelling pitch, especially in a world where power from legacy players, including turbine manufacturers, is backlogged.<br>That growth story rests on a supply chain claim that Bloom's CEO has made at least five times since February 2025, on earnings calls, to Semafor, on a podcast — and onstage with The Wall Street Journal last month. The promise: Bloom has "no China supply chain" and is "not dependent on China for scandium," the rare earth at the core of each Bloom fuel cell. Bloom’s claim matters because Beijing now requires an export license for every shipment of scandium leaving China. If Bloom depends on Chinese scandium, China holds an off-switch on Bloom — and on the American data centers that may one day use its power.<br>The problem: Bloom is, in fact, reliant on C5 Chinese scandium, according to global trade data, Chinese corporate filings, satellite imagery, and Hunterbrook's messages with Bloom's suppliers in China. Hunterbrook traced four separate China-linked routes into Bloom's supply chain — scandium oxide shipped directly to its Delaware plant, plus scandium-bearing ceramics and powders flowing through intermediaries in Thailand, Japan, and South Korea. A sales representative of Hunan Oriental Scandium — which claims over 50% of the global market for fuel-cell-grade scandium oxide — told Hunterbrook: "We are also BE's largest supplier of scandium." Asked how the material reaches U.S. customers under Beijing's controls: "Not exported directly." Hunan Oriental was featured at Bloom’s May supplier conference as one of three Chinese scandium-linked suppliers. One received Bloom’s “Impact Supplier Award.”<br>Show Me the Scandium: Even with supply from China, the scandium math fails. Hunterbrook's supply-demand model — built from government filings, Bloom's patents, industry data, and peer-reviewed studies — shows Bloom alone needs roughly 220 tons of scandium oxide to meet Wall Street's 5 GW expectations. But that’s against total projected global supply of only about 240 tons versus total global demand of about 310 tons, including supply locked up by customers like Lockheed Martin (for the F-35 fighter jet). Bloom already claims to be the largest scandium consumer in the world. On the numbers, the production ramp underpinning Bloom's valuation appears physically and commercially unattainable — with essentially all Wall Street models of Bloom's production implying a scandium shortage by 2028 based on Hunterbrook's model.<br>The demand side of the story is also not what it appears. In 4Q25, 74% of Bloom's revenue — $574 million of $778 million — came from joint ventures Bloom part-owns with Brookfield. Bloom's own footnotes concede these customers "may be a project-finance affiliate rather than the ultimate end user." What Bloom’s recent revenue growth shows is that Brookfield will finance Bloom's production, not that a meaningful customer base has adopted Bloom's fuel cells. And it appears Bloom has been recognizing revenue well before its fuel cells have actually been deployed.<br>The Brookfield partnership's initial promise, a European AI factory site to be named "before the end of the year," does not seem to have been fulfilled. The designated anchor tenant for its unbuilt AI project is Radiant, Brookfield's own captive cloud company, which has no publicly named CEO or disclosed customers. The Brookfield fund backing Radiant is anchored in part by Nvidia, whose chips the factories will house. Even by the standards of AI roundtripping — which can be positive sum — the deal looks especially circular.<br>Bloom markets an unaudited $20 billion "backlog" of orders. Its remaining performance obligations (RPO) — the analog to backlog that its auditor reviews — total $492.6 million as of March 31. That’s roughly 2.5% of the backlog. Among 10 peers Hunterbrook analyzed, including GE Vernova, Oracle, Microsoft, and CoreWeave, the widest comparable gap between backlog and RPO was about 2x. Bloom's is over 40x, in part because it...