Date: April 28, 2026 | Source: Motley Fool (fool.com) / company press release
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Michael Tierney: Thank you, and good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining us for Bloom Energy's First Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. Joining me today are K.R. Sridhar, Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Simon Edwards, our Chief Financial Officer. K.R. will begin with an overview of our progress, and then Simon will review financial highlights for the quarter. After our prepared remarks, we will have time to take your questions. I now turn the call over to K.R.
K.R. Sridhar (Founder, Chairman & CEO): Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us today. Bloom delivered a record first quarter. Revenue, gross margin and operating income all came in materially above our prior outlook, and based on what we are seeing across the business, we are also raising our full year guidance and raising it materially.
Now the marketplace is recognizing and embracing our proposition of clean, reliable on-site power that is community-friendly and deployed at the speed of AI. Bloom is rapidly becoming the standard and go-to choice for on-site power. Last night, Oracle announced a new power paradigm for Project Jupiter, a multi-gigawatt AI factory to be built in New Mexico. We are thrilled to partner with Oracle. This up to 2.45 gigawatt power block will replace Project Jupiter's previously planned gas turbines and backup diesel generators with Bloom Energy Servers. It will be 100% Bloom. When completed, it will be one of the largest islanded microgrid power facilities in the world.
Oracle pivoted to a Bloom-only solution for 2 main reasons: first, to be a responsible corporate citizen and partner by being responsive to resident concerns about air quality, water use, noise and increasing electricity rates. Second, to stand up their grid-independent and clean AI factory with even greater reliability and speed. At a time where every quarter of delay translates into hundreds of millions in foregone AI revenue, speed of powered infrastructure development is the difference between leading and following.
Becoming the sole power provider for Project Jupiter is a milestone for Bloom, but it's not going to be a one-off project. Where Oracle is going is where the broader market is headed. Well more than half of our current data center backlog comes from other hyperscalers, neo clouds and colocation providers. Just like the Oracle Jupiter project, these microgrid installations will use no grid, no dirty diesel generators for backup, no battery banks for load following, no engines, no turbines, just Bloom and Bloom alone.
Time to power has gone from a procurement consideration to an existential necessity. The companies driving the AI transformation are racing against each other on the one hand, and bumping into the bottlenecks common to building conventional infrastructure—permits, permissions and community acceptance—on the other. The winner will be the one who can grow and deploy faster and on the schedule the market demands.
Our current manufacturing footprint will allow us to deliver 5 gigawatts of product annually. We will expand to that capacity and meet the delivery dates needed by our customers. In other words, today, we are not order constrained and not capacity constrained. The pace of our revenue growth is decided by how fast our customers can build their greenfield sites, not how fast we can power them. We will never be a bottleneck to our customers. Based on demand profile, we have now shifted to adding capacity continuously—hundreds of megawatts a quarter as opposed to lumpy one-off additions.
Beyond speed, our architecture creates real flexibility for our customers. Our modular copy-exact systems are portable and fungible and meet air quality requirements in virtually all jurisdictions. Our energy servers are now cost competitive with grid power in most U.S. markets and with off-grid alternatives in nearly all markets. With over a decade of double-digit cost reductions, we remain the only on-site generation solution with a sustained downward sloping cost curve.
Now to our outlook for the year. The strength of the quarter and the commercial momentum we see across the board gives us conviction and confidence to raise guidance materially. We are raising 2026 revenue guidance from $3.1 billion to $3.3 billion, up to $3.4 billion to $3.8 billion. At the midpoint, that takes growth from 60% year-over-year to 80%. We are also raising our gross margin outlook from 32% to 34%. You can see we are prioritizing growth and profitability in equal measure.
Now I want to introduce Simon Edwards, who recently joined Bloom as our Chief Financial Officer. Over the past year, we have been deliberate in our search. Simon brings a rare combination of capabilities—a systems engineering background, a digitally native approach to building businesses, and his time at Grok has given him a front-row seat to the explosive growth occurring across AI. With that, Simon, a very warm welcome, and the mic is yours.
Simon Edwards (CFO): Thank you, K.R. I'm excited to be part of the Bloom team and to be speaking for the first time on a Bloom earnings call. Moving to our numbers, I will discuss our Q1 financial performance and make a few comments about what we expect in 2026. Highlights include record Q1 revenue with year-over-year growth of more than 100%, continued year-over-year gross margin expansion and record Q1 cash flow.
Revenue for the quarter was $751.1 million, up 130.4% year-over-year. This is the first quarter of greater than 100% year-over-year growth in Bloom's history as a public company. Product revenue was up both year-over-year and sequentially, reaching an all-time high of $653.3 million for the quarter. Service revenue for the quarter was $61.9 million, up 15.6% year-over-year. Gross margin for the quarter was 31.5%, up approximately 280 basis points versus last year. Product margins were 35.3%. Services margins were 18%, up 13 points from Q1 last year, achieving a double-digit gross margin for the fourth consecutive quarter and profitability for the ninth consecutive quarter.
Operating income for the quarter was $129.7 million, compared to $13.2 million last year, an increase of $116.5 million, with operating margins reaching 17.3%, up more than 1,300 basis points year-over-year. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $143 million compared to $25.2 million last year, with EBITDA margin expanding by more than 1,100 basis points to approximately 19%. Non-GAAP fully diluted EPS for the quarter was $0.44 versus $0.03 a year ago.
Even with the upfront working capital required to support higher production and deliveries, cash flow from operating activities was an inflow of $73.6 million—positive for the first time in the first quarter of the year, which is typically a seasonally weaker period. This was driven by a step change in profitability, strong collections and customer prepayments to reserve capacity. We ended Q1 with $2.52 billion in total cash on the balance sheet.
Turning to guidance. We are increasing our revenue projections from the previous range of $3.1 billion to $3.3 billion up to a range of $3.4 billion to $3.8 billion, with the lower end of the updated range sitting above the upper bound of the prior range. This updated guidance represents 80% year-over-year growth at the midpoint. We now expect our non-GAAP gross margin to increase from 30% in 2025 to approximately 34% in 2026. Our non-GAAP operating income expectation is now $600 million to $750 million. Our non-GAAP fully diluted EPS expectation is now $1.85 to $2.25. To conclude, we delivered record Q1 financial results, and we are optimistic in our full year 2026 financials being the best in Bloom history. Operator, we are now happy to take questions.
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Mark Strouse (JPMorgan): Can you comment on the operating leverage and what you're seeing with service contracts, particularly the duration of those contracts?
K.R. Sridhar: We have a 100% attach rate between our product sales and our service. There is not a single deal that we do without an attach rate to our service. Even with the data center opportunities, on average it's 10 to 15 years. It's a tremendous source of annuity revenue.
David Arcaro (Morgan Stanley): Are you seeing opportunities to hold pricing or see projects with increased price opportunities?
K.R. Sridhar: We completely distinguish and think differently about this. We don't compare our pricing with engines and turbines. It's apples and oranges. We are creating a completely different value for our customer—be it eliminating all the Band-Aids of a mechanical solution, be it the overbuild you need for reliability. We always focus not on cost, not on price, but on creating value for our partners and creating value for us.
Christopher Dendrinos (RBC): What's changed in the past months that shifts you to continuous capacity increases rather than scaling as customers call in orders?
K.R. Sridhar: To say that business is accelerating is an understatement. This is a secular demand that's going to last for many, many years. The amount of demand being generated and the rate at which it's growing is significantly faster than what alternative providers of power can create. Think of Bloom's capacity increase as an analog dial that constantly keeps increasing as opposed to some digital step function. We are going to build factories as needed—that will be normal course of operation.
Nicholas Amicucci (Evercore): Is it fair to say the vast majority of backlog is AI training, with an incremental leg from inference?
K.R. Sridhar: Inference is going to be much bigger than training in terms of total gigawatt need, but it will not be concentrated in multi-gigawatt data centers. Inference is at the edge, closer to highly dense populations. If you're seeing resistance to a conventional power plant in the backyard of a remote training data center, just think what that resistance would be in a city if you don't have clean solutions. We see that as a huge opportunity coming our way.
Manav Gupta (UBS): Your solution with ultracapacitor and high reliability needs minimal battery backup, and it avoids the transformer/rectifier queues. Can you talk about these two factors?
K.R. Sridhar: We are purpose-built and purpose-designed to provide digital power for the digital age. Today, the most important point is it's not just the deal we did with Oracle—we talked about several other projects where there is no grid connectivity, no diesel backup generators, no turbines and no batteries because the 100% Bloom one-stop solution can solve that. The switch to 800-volt DC is inevitable because the world does not have enough copper and does not have enough transformers. Once they try it, they will not go back on it.
Ben Kallo (Baird): How do you think growth evolves across hyperscalers, utilities, and the international side?
K.R. Sridhar: What we are doing in AI right now is truly a rinse and repeat of what we have done in the commercial and industrial space—work hard, get a pilot with a lighthouse customer, delight them, scale out with them, and 70% to 80% of our business kept coming from repeat customers. With utility-scale customers, we see strong interest from both gas utilities and electric utilities to partner in the face of favorable regulation. On the international front, it's an 80-20 rule—the action today is in the U.S., but there will be a delay, not an absence, of international opportunity.
Colin Rusch (Oppenheimer): Talk about the cadence of installation times and potential to participate in project-level economics.
K.R. Sridhar: We shifted from a build-in-the-dirt solution to a solution on a skid that will just show up and get connected with the least amount of work. We have closed an order of magnitude reduction in the field time it takes to install our systems. We can get a 100-megawatt project up and running faster and with the least amount of field hours than any competing technology out there.
Vikram Bagri (Citi): Is there price elasticity to demand as CCGT prices go up?
K.R. Sridhar: The rate of our growth is faster than what any energy technology ever has done in the past. This is not a tipping point. We are going to make sure we continuously improve our product to offer the best value to our customers and the best neighborly solution to our communities. Power doesn't become an impediment to AI, doesn't become an impediment to electrification, doesn't become an impediment to digitization first in the United States and then use that model across the world.