Bloom Energy Stock Rose 16-Fold in 5 Years. All of the Gain Came in the Last 2.

For three years, a $10,000 stake in Bloom Energy (NYSE:BE) looked like a bad bet. Bought at the stock's Sept. 29, 2021, closing price of $18.55, those shares were worth just around $5,800 by late September 2024.

Now they're worth about $160,000. The fuel cell maker's stock sits near $298 as I write, so the stake has risen about 16-fold. And all of it came from the share price, because Bloom doesn't pay a dividend.

All of that gain showed up in the last two years, after artificial intelligence (AI) data centers began buying Bloom's on-site power systems in volume. Before that, Bloom's growth was slowing and the business lost money every year.

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Bloom lost money year after year

Bloom's revenue climbed 23% in 2022 to around $1.2 billion. But growth then cooled to 11% in 2023 and around 10% in 2024.

And the bottom line never turned. Bloom's net loss attributable to common stockholders was around $164 million in 2021, and it passed $300 million in both 2022 and 2023.

Even 2024, the year Bloom swung to a full-year operating profit ($23 million, versus a $209 million operating loss in 2023), still finished with a net loss of about $29 million.

Shares closed as low as $8.58 in February 2024, which would've cut the $10,000 stake to around $4,600 -- under half of what went in.

I'd guess many shareholders gave up sometime in that stretch. And whoever sold at the 2024 low, after over two years of watching the investment drop, missed the full rally that followed.

Data center demand

The turn came on Nov. 14, 2024, when Bloom announced a deal to supply American Electric Power with up to 1 gigawatt of fuel cells to help power AI data centers. Bloom called it the biggest commercial procurement of fuel cells worldwide so far.

Shares surged around 59% the next trading day, and the business soon followed.

At the start of 2025, management guided for revenue growth of about 19% at the midpoint. Bloom wound up growing revenue 37% to $2.02 billion, fueled, management said, by significant growth from the AI data center industry. Revenue later cleared $1 billion in one quarter for the first time, hitting $1.07 billion in the second quarter of 2026, up 166% year over year. And management now guides for around $3.9 billion to $4.2 billion in revenue this year, roughly double 2025 at the midpoint. Put another way, a company that grew around 10% in 2024 now expects to double its sales in one year.

Profits finally showed up, too. Bloom's operating margin hit 17.1% in the second quarter of 2026, up from minus 0.9% a year before.

Even more important, net income attributable to common stockholders hit $196 million in the second quarter, versus a loss of around $43 million a year earlier. Add the first quarter's $71 million, and Bloom earned about $267 million in the first half of 2026. That's after a net loss of around $88 million for all of 2025.

"Today, all the major US hyperscalers and over a dozen US neoclouds, AI labs, and colocation data center operators have validated and approved our power solutions for their AI factories," said founder and CEO KR Sridhar as Bloom posted its second-quarter results in July.

Another 16-fold gain?

A repeat would need Bloom's market value, around $88 billion now, to top $1.4 trillion.

Of course, the stock can still rise from here. But the starting price is very different. A 2021 buyer got a business that went on to lose money in all of the next four years.

Shares today cost around 60 times the earnings Bloom is expected to post in 2027, a price-to-earnings ratio that arguably already assumes data center demand keeps growing for years to come.

And any delay in data center projects could hit a stock at this valuation hard. Shares dropped on Sept. 24 after Oracle sent a force majeure notice for Project Jupiter, a New Mexico data center campus designed to run on Bloom's fuel cells, then recovered after Bloom said Oracle is still committed to its contract.

Yes, Bloom has earned some of that optimism. But most of the past five years' gain probably came from Bloom becoming a profitable, fast-growing company, and that change now shows up in the stock price. At this price, I'd want to see Bloom string together a full year of profits before paying up.

Daniel Sparks and his clients do not have positions in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Bloom Energy and Oracle. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.