With AI electricity consumption surging and utilities starting to have difficulties meeting demand, both cloud giants and utilities are actively looking at solutions to tackle the power challenge. Deploying new solar/wind capacity and building nuclear reactors (or reopening idle ones) are clearly part of the agenda. But these initiatives also represent a multi-year effort, suggesting that they are unlikely to be sufficient to handle extra electricity demand stemming from data centers in the short-term.
We highlighted a couple of months ago data center on-site power generation as an efficient short-term or transitory solution to fill the gap, with fuel cells standing out.
Fuel cells can be deployed in less than two months, enabling customers to rapidly meet growing power needs. They represent a reliable and clean source of power as fuel cells can provide 24/7 baseload, are isolated from potential grid issues (they are installed on data center premises) and as they operate on hydrogen, natural gas or blends of these fuels. And they can offer a competitive power price – e.g. Bloom Energy’s solution is at $0.10/kWh, globally in line with utilities rates in the US.
Over the last few days, this on-site fuel cell solution has been gaining significant traction. Bloom announced yesterday a partnership with cloud computing company CoreWeave to deploy its solid oxide fuel cell technology (nat gas-based) at a data center located in Illinois in Q3 2025. And last week, Bloom entered into a dual agreement with Silicon Valley Power and Amazon to deliver 20 MW of fuel cells to an AWS data center.
These deals follow Bloom’s agreement with Intel in May to deploy its fuel cell technology to support Intel’s data center expansion efforts in Santa Clara, California.
There could be much more to come now that the technology has won over several marquee customers. Notably, a Silicon Valley Power official commented that data centers need greater electric power than the utility is providing, that the utility asked local authorities to authorize securing an additional 80 MW as part of the agreement to service these customers and that at least four other customers are interested in a deal shaped as the Bloom-Amazon-SVP one.
Overall, a major opportunity is opening up for fuel cell makers as an increasing number of data center operators show commitment to use alternative forms of power generation.
