Bloom Energy Delivered Power to an Oracle Data Center in 55 Days. Here's Why That Number Matters More Than the Revenue Beat.

The largest bottleneck for the artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure build-out is electricity. That is according to industry leaders, such as Elon Musk, who plans to invest tens of billions in AI data centers at Space Exploration Technologies.

Bloom Energy (NYSE: BE) has been a huge winner during this electricity supply crunch, with its fuel-cell power solution utilized by data centers. It all comes down to the fact that Bloom Energy can bring power quickly to a data center, and in fact, it delivered power to an Oracle data center in just 55 days this year.

Here's why speed is so important for electric power deployments in 2026 and whether Bloom Energy has built a sustainable business as the leading fuel cell provider for data centers.

Quickly bringing on-site power to data centers

Bloom builds modular electric power systems housing fuel cells. The systems use a fuel source, primarily natural gas, and convert it to electricity, with no particulate pollutants like traditional generators. This can be helpful to data center owners in two ways.

First, Bloom Energy can quickly deliver electricity to a data center when it is first constructed, whereas connecting to the broader power grid may take years. For its recent Oracle deployment, Bloom said that it got the system up and running in just 55 days. This makes Bloom Energy a perfect bridge before a data center complex can connect to the actual power grid.

Second, Bloom's fuel cells can provide backup power in the event of an outage, and data center owners want as close to 100% uptime as possible to ensure there are no disruptions for their end software customers.

There has been a boom in demand for Bloom's products across the myriad data centers being built throughout the U.S. Revenue rose 166% year over year last quarter to a little more than $1 billion, mainly from product revenue sales and significantly beating analyst estimates. Importantly, Bloom says its backlog is growing much faster than revenue and won't be depleted for many years.

Image source: Getty Images.

Service revenue can drive stable earnings

Investors might think Bloom Energy will have only a temporary growth spurt in this immense data center build-out before falling back to Earth. This underestimates the length of its customer contracts.

When signing deals with data centers, Bloom Energy plans to provide its fuel cells on-site for more than a decade, even if they are only used as backup generators. This can mean service revenue for years that spans energy usage, maintenance, and systems monitoring by Bloom Energy.

Its order backlog at the end of 2025 was $20 billion, with $14 billion of that coming from future services revenue. As long as Bloom Energy remains the primary fuel cell provider for data centers and other sectors, such as large retail outlets, it should maintain stable earnings power, especially if it can increase the number of modular units deployed worldwide.

One risk with Bloom Energy stock today

With soaring demand, Bloom Energy's stock price is up more than 1,000% during the past five years, reaching a market cap of roughly $82 billion as investors grow optimistic about modular power deployment at data centers.

The main risk for Bloom Energy is fairly obvious: that in data center build-out growth slows down significantly. This could occur for many reasons, including a lack of capital for AI infrastructure, innovations in efficiency for AI use cases, or slowing growth in end-customer usage.

Bloom's business wouldn't fall apart given its long-term contracts discussed. However, with the stock currently trading at a lofty price-to-sales ratio (P/S) of 22 for a low-margin energy business, missing Wall Street's expectations could lead to a collapse in its share price.

Brett Schafer has no position 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.