Do Bloom's Fuel Cells Work as Claimed?

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Do Bloom's Fuel Cells Work as Claimed? Data Says No

Daniel DeLorenzo

July 30, 2026 2:00 PM<br>EST

BY:

Dhruv Patel

EDITOR:

Vikas Kumar

Bloom Energy had become one of the AI boom's most-loved stocks, promising to power data centers faster than the grid. Then Hunterbrook exposed holes in the company’s fuel cell story. Now, government performance data across four regions points to a more basic problem: Bloom's fuel cells apparently don't deliver the efficiency, output, or lifespan the company once claimed.

Based on Hunterbrook Media’s reporting, at the time of publication Hunterbrook Capital is short $BE and long a basket of comparable securities. Positions may change at any time. This article is not investment advice or any recommendation. See full disclosures below.

Hunterbrook compiled a record of Bloom's fuel cell performance from public data spanning 15 years: government datasets across the U.S. (New York, Delaware, California) and South Korea, as well as self-reported federal filings covering 126 plants in nine U.S. states.<br>Across the datasets, the fuel cells’ measured efficiency appears to fall below Bloom’s disclosed benchmarks before the five-year replacement interval the company claims. In New York, Hunterbrook calculated that all 37 systems fell below Bloom’s efficiency benchmark at a median of 20 months, with only one declining slowly enough to be on pace to stay above it for five years. In California, 105 of the 231 projects with usable fuel data recorded at least one month below the level at which a 2025 contract requires Bloom to repair or replace the system. And even on cumulative lifetime efficiency, the measure Bloom most typically uses, 44 of the 126 plants in the federal record fall below the guarantee line.<br>Bloom's 95% output benchmark — a measure of how much electricity the cells actually produce against their rated capacity — was missed almost everywhere, almost always: 152 of 156 months in Delaware, 97.4% of months in California, and 22 of the last 24 months at one of Bloom's largest continuously metered Korean plants.<br>The public data is reported daily or monthly, so Hunterbrook uses those intervals to track the timing and persistence of underperformance — not to determine any potential contractual breach, which may be assessed monthly, annually, or cumulatively depending on the contract.<br>A part-owner of a Bloom project in New York told Hunterbrook the company paid their group a multimillion-dollar contractual penalty after failing to meet one of its guarantees.<br>Some customers report adequate performance: One said Bloom "remains in compliance with our contract," and a California operator called their project "fairly reliable," but won't buy more, citing price. Other customers said they no longer work with Bloom.<br>Hunterbrook’s findings directly implicate Bloom’s data center ambitions. Based on these numbers, fuel cells may be a less attractive alternative to grid power and gas turbines than they appear on paper: Given the consistently low efficiency and output numbers across Bloom’s projects, data center operators would likely have to use more gas and install more fuel cells (and replace them more frequently) than typically modeled to reach the desired capacity. It is, perhaps, one explanation for why Bloom has only named several partners.<br>Bloom did not reply to Hunterbrook’s repeated requests for comment for this article. After Hunterbrook published its prior investigation, Bloom filed an 8-K form with the SEC as a rebuttal, claiming it “categorically rejects the Report’s claims regarding the Company’s financial results and accounting.”

It’s always been a good story: a box that turns gas into electricity through a chemical reaction, with no combustion required.<br>Since the early 2000s, that has been Bloom Energy’s ($BE) promise — and it's one fit for the AI era as data center developers scramble to improve what they call “time to power.”<br>Earlier this year, Bloom briefly reached a market cap of about $100 billion, with the stock up roughly 1,000% over the preceding 12 months. This came as Bloom announced splashy deals with partners like Oracle, which agreed to purchase up to 2.45 gigawatts of fuel cells for its flagship site in New Mexico.<br>This month, Hunterbrook reported cracks in Bloom’s story, including the company’s sourcing of a key rare earth ingredient, scandium, from China, a practice the company has repeatedly and publicly denied. Hunterbrook also detailed delays across Bloom’s biggest planned projects, at least one of which has wobbled further in recent weeks.<br>But beyond those headwinds lies a more elemental question, which Hunterbrook has investigated through state regulatory filings, foreign generation data, and interviews with Bloom customers and former employees.<br>Do the fuel cells actually work as advertised?<br>The answer...