Name: KR Sridhar on the Growing Energy Demands of AI Data Centers
Uploaded: 2026-06-10T13:12:00Z
Duration: 18 min 6 s
Description: Bloom Energy founder and chief executive KR Sridhar discusses the explosive AI-driven demand for electricity. He says that large AI data centers should generate power on-site rather than relying on public electrical grids, and that renewables cannot reliably provide power for data centers.

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Bloom Energy founder and chief executive KR Sridhar discusses the explosive AI-driven demand for electricity. He says that large AI data centers should generate power on-site rather than relying on public electrical grids, and that renewables cannot reliably provide power for data centers.

https://m.wsj.net/video/20260610/cc0af988-9a89-4ecd-a565-8a28eac218bc/1/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

KR Sridhar on the Growing Energy Demands of AI Data Centers

KR Sridhar, welcome to "What's News."

Thank you so much for having me.

In a nutshell, for those who aren't aware, Bloom sells and operates fuel cells. They're packaged into what you call energy servers. They can be run at a local business or an institution to generate power on-site running off of hydrogen in the end game, biogas from organic waste, or natural gas in most cases. A company founded in 2001, but boy, are the vibes good. Now, you are supplementing your long-term clients in education, healthcare, manufacturing with firms that are in the AI race now. And before we get into some of the challenges around the AI build out, I just want you to define for us the scale of opportunity that you are seeing here. I don't think it's an accident that your stock is up 150% so far this year.

Thank you. So, look, what's happening in AI, we are going from megawatt orders to tens of megawatts would be a big order. It went to hundreds of megawatts. The last order we closed is 2.5 gigawatts. That's two and a half nuclear power plants worth of power going into a single site, and that's just one order. And that's a few billion dollars worth in terms of CapEx and a few more billion dollars worth of operational maintenance over the time. So, we have told the markets that we'll grow it at 80% year over year from last year to this year, and I see this as systemic and secular that's gonna stay for years to come because the world needs a lot of electricity.

And you see that kind of consistent demand from the hyperscalers as well. There's been some concern, you know, in recent days. How reliable are those contracts?

So, we only take firm orders, and what we install are electricity generators that are fungible and used in different sites for our hyperscale customers, whether it's a large training center today, if it's multiple gigawatts. Let's say, for some reason, two years from now, you need much smaller data centers in multiple places. Unlike a turbine, which is hard to break up-

Is anyone predicting that? Into blades. unlike a turbine that you can't break up into blades, our systems can be broken up into small modules and shipped wherever they need to be shipped. So, we are the most modular, the most flexible power platform there is. So, are we worried about any slowdown? The answer is no.

I mean, just what percent of your businesses is for the hyperscalers now?

Today, it'll be greater than 50% and it'll stay that way for a while to come because of this unbelievable growth that we are seeing in that sector.

How have you been affected by the Iran War?

Not really. We have not just because-

Supply chain?

Gas is our key, you know, like supply in the US is awash in gas. For the rest of the world, in terms of supply chains, the modular, flexible, resilient, reliable product that we make is the same approach we use to everything that we do, including our supply chains, so we have multiple continents from which we get our parts, multiple suppliers. So, we have had no issues with supply chain.

The one notable country that you're not sourcing from is China.

Is China, yes.

How does that set you apart from other American firms in the clean energy revolution?

Look, at some point in time, very early on in the company, we made a decision that we are only going to depend on supply chains that we can completely trust, and that was a country we avoided.

When did you make that bet?

2005.

It seems to have panned out. Does that tee up Department of Defense work? I could see this being a very valuable asset for the US.

It will be, and we can't speak too much about it, but obviously, for intelligence and defense.

You could break some news here. It'd be great. All right, so you're growing in spite of a Middle East war. Well done, you, but there is a powerful new trend taking hold across the US now, which I'm sure you're picking up on. A year ago, we were seeing in Oval Office events, announcements of new data centers. These were being talked about by the president as symbols of innovation and of job creation. Now, the pitchforks are out.

They're out because people are worried about multiple things. The first thing is, the grid simply cannot support gigawatt data centers. The grid was not built to be able to do that. The grid was a flywheel that was supposed to take care of a lot of retail customers. If you are one single large customer that's gonna suck up most of the electricity coming from a substation, whether you are an aluminum smelter in the past, whether you're a glass-making factory, they all depended on their own on-site power. Bring your own power, right? So, these big data centers today consume a lot more power than even those aluminum smelters, and for them to have naively thought that they can rely on the grid for that kind of power was wrong.

Doomed to fail.

Doomed to fail. And at some scale, it was gonna break. But even before that happened, the utility companies tried to provide them the power. But remember, it's a freeway and a highway paid for by the rate payer. And if one rate payer was consuming all that power and everybody else was paying the tolls for that road, people got upset.

You're not surprised about the public backlash.

You shouldn't be surprised at all. Absolutely not, absolutely not. So, then you get to the next point of saying, "Bring your own power." But these data centers, unlike the aluminum smelters, are not built far away from people. They're built in cities and towns. Who wants a big power plant in their backyard? Immediately, your property values are gonna go down, the amount of air pollution is gonna go up, the water usage is gonna go up. And what is the benefit for the local community that's bringing that in? Not much because it's not creating the thousands of jobs like an automotive plant would. For those reasons, you saw social unrest. When we bring a Bloom unit there, we don't consume water. We don't burn the natural gas, so we don't create any air pollution.

Noise?

We don't create any noise. You can stand next to that unit and talk like we are talking, and it'll be perfectly clear.

That's what I think many people have been upset about. I didn't know this before, but it's the sound of power generation, not the server itself that's making the racket.

Racket. And then you would have, if you had a combustion device like a turbine or an engine, the amount of NOx pollution and particulate pollution would be something the mothers should be worried about their kids, rightfully so. And we don't create any of that. We don't use the water up, so we consume no water when we make electricity.

Are your sales teams out there now calling data centers and saying, "Hey, you're being run on diesel turbines. Put one of our units in."

Data centers are calling us because they can't get permits.

How fast has that shift occurred?

It's occurring very fast right now. We have seen multiple places where there's local opposition, and so the permitting process gets delayed if there's local opposition. And in the AI race, it's all about speed, and so it's not only getting the permits quickly, but our modular LEGO blocks can be installed very fast. The one thing that we have spoken publicly about is a 55-megawatt, you know, data center for Oracle. We promised them power in 90 days from the day they signed up, which is almost unheard of in the power industry.

Where the lead times we're hearing are seven, eight, nine years to install to the grid.

Yeah, for us it was, we said 90 days from the day they signed the contract. We actually delivered in 55 days. So, that's time to power. That's the AI speed.

I understand there's an argument here that, by avoiding the grid, you are not monopolizing water, grid power. You're not causing blackouts. You're not polluting the air or maybe people's ears with the sound of your power generation. And yet, do you not risk being swept up in the broader pushback against AI infrastructure? A community says, "I don't care how you're powering the data center. We just don't want it, period."

Look, I don't think there's anything that's NIMBY proof. We are not NIMBY proof, okay? But if you want development, we are the best possible alternative that you have. Best possible choice you have. That's the first thing. The second thing is, AI definitely accelerates our business, but our business was growing at 40% a year with us being a profitable company by providing on-site power. Here's what you need to understand. Every single technology we know has started centralized, and with time, moved to the edge where people are, so it goes from centralized to distributed. Look at computing. We're building a lot of mainframe computers called data centers. We're not buying IBM 360s, okay? They're server blades, distributed computing. We went from landline telephones to cell phones, centralized to distributed. It's time for electricity to go from centralized to distributed. That's a big idea.

Is there not a way to make the grid work for data centers?

Similar to... If you just take a very large load like the AI loads, half a gigawatt, gigawatts, even if you can make it work, it's probably the most inefficient, worst way for you to be powering that data center, even if you can make it work. The reason is, you're generating the power very far away. You know exactly where it's needed. Why are you using copper wires and transmitting all that power and losing power along the way? Second thing, you're converting a molecule to electricity. You generate some amount of heat. If that heat is right next to the point of use, like a data center, you can use that heat for cooling, and the data centers require a lot of cooling. Instead here, you waste that heat and then you use more electricity to do the cooling. Number three, the large power plants in the grid provide AC power. Alternating current is what that's called. Our chips use direct current, or DC, power at low voltage. So, this is speaking Latin. You need French, and you're converting them to multiple languages along the way. Why would you do that? We natively produce DC power at 800 volts to be able to supply directly to the racks, and this is where the future is. And the beauty about this, in addition to all that, as long as you depend on a pole and wire, you're going to use backups because the pole and the wire is going to fail. That's called a power outage, right? You're gonna have that all the time, so you need backup generators. Whereas if you're producing power on site reliably, modularly with fault tolerance, how we build it, you don't need any of that backup. For all those reasons, the grid would be a terrible way to power a data center.

We reported this week that Ireland is ordering new data centers to, as you said earlier, BYOP, bring their own or bring your own power. The rule there is, whether it's on site, which would be very much a Bloom's alley, or if these data centers can bring in largely renewable energy from local sources. Is that a workable middle ground? It sounds nice.

I don't think... People underestimate how much land, how much power, and how much firming of that power is needed when you use renewables. Renewables are going to be only on when nature decides to give it to you, whether it's the sunlight or the wind, okay? The amount of firming that you need. Data centers require not just normal utility availability, reliability, power, which is 99.9%. That's what is called three nines. Data centers require four nines and five nines reliability. To take renewables and get it to that level of reliability and supply power to a data center, the amount of batteries you would need, the amount of land you would need for solar, the amount of land you would need for wind, it's just a preposterous concept that's not practical.

Where do batteries fit in? We saw just yesterday GM announcing, following Ford's lead last month that they plan to use batteries at scale to help store power for data centers and other customers. That's currently not a part of your product offering. Why not?

So, the electricity system is very complex and large. Every technology has a place and a role. Electricity is the ultimate perishable. The instant you make it, if you don't use it, it's gone. So, what does bottling electricity look like, okay? So, a battery is a way to bottle electricity for a short amount of time in the same place you want to use it. You will not charge a battery in Australia, ship it to Singapore, and then bring it back to recharge. You will also use it for very short amount of time, short periods. In the morning, you'll charge. In the evening, you'll discharge. Whereas when you need continuous electricity over a long period of time, even five days of storms and hurricanes, when there's no sunlight, you need to convert a molecule to electricity, you need to generate electricity.

It's not enough to smooth-

That's what we do.

It's not enough to smooth renewable variations.

The scale at which you will need it will make it cost-prohibitive, so any solution that's cost-prohibitive is not practical at that scale.

And on scale.

On scale.

I just want to ask you where you see this business going in the future, demand for electricity going. I know you associate, you know, electrification with development fundamentally.

So, there is no electricity poor country that's economically rich. There's no economically rich country that's electricity poor, so they're completely correlated. We have very fast moved into a digital age with a digital infrastructure. Next to air, water, food, shelter, every human being born on this planet requires electricity. They need that in abundance. When we provide that in abundance, most of the geopolitical problems in the world go away and most of the wars we fight will go away if we can create electricity abundance on this planet.

You must have been very pleased to see-

And it's absolutely possible.

A book called "Abundance" hit the bestseller list last year.

So, we have been talking abundance for the last 25 years. I'm glad it's getting into the, you know, vernacular, so it's fantastic. I see that possibility. And here's the optimistic message I just want everybody to understand. We will look back 10 years from now and say the great demand that AI caused and disrupted a mechanical industrial age infrastructure with band-aids to solve a digital infrastructure problem. That got broken, thanks to the AI energy hunger. And because those companies were leaders, adopted new technology, and were willing to pay for it, the learning curve and the cost down has now brought distributed power everywhere in the world. And when you bring distributed electricity everywhere in the world, you truly democratize the world. Because without democratic power at the local level, there is no real democracy in a digitized world.

In our final seconds, who's going to be deciding they need that power that doesn't realize it yet?

There is going to be a point at which the affordability, the practicality, the abundance, and the availability will come where you don't need anybody making decisions. This is the point I make to people. We didn't hold annual conferences called COP or CART going and telling countries why they shouldn't be building landline telephones and they should be adopting cell phones. The only reason we are doing that in electricity is we are trying to sell them a bundle of goods that's not practical, and it's too expensive. Once we solve the affordability issue in a practical way, it'll automatically get adopted. That's the nature of business in the world.