Bloom Energy CEO: Why We Aren’t in an AI Capex Bubble | Energy Sovereignty & The Future of Power

Ready to go? K.R., I'm so excited for this. I am the biggest fan of the company and the story, so it's such a pleasure to have you here in person.

1. Fear of Failure vs Thrill of Winning

K.R. Sridhar

Thank you so much for having me. It's a great honor to be here.

2. Empathy as a Leadership Tool

I ask some of the best founders in the world this question, but it really intrigues me on mindset. Are you more motivated by the thrill of winning or the fear of failing?

K.R. Sridhar

To lose is something I simply cannot contemplate. There's nothing that I do where I put effort, put time, and think of failure as an option.

Before starting the company, I did the Mars missions. There, you cannot call a plumber on Mars. You cannot fix something along the way. So, what you do is think through the 10 big things that can happen and ruin your life. Then you say, “Okay, I'm going to mitigate that by every possible workaround, because something's going to happen.”

I hate failure, but the way I deal with failure is through mitigation. Think about the things that can go wrong and prepare ahead of time with a plan around it, a workaround around it, because bad things can happen. You can fall down. Falling down is not what I'm concerned about. It's about getting up.

What would you say to someone who is struggling to get up? If you're advising your child, or a lot of people who've gone through layoffs—it's a tough time in tech—who are struggling to get up again?

K.R. Sridhar

The really hard experiences are what shape you—what you're really made of. It's very easy to feel like you're a hero when everything is going well for you.

These hard experiences, as hard as they may be, if you just learn from them and look forward, don't look in the rearview mirror. When you're driving, you're looking through the windshield. You're looking forward, okay? You look in the rearview mirror only to learn, not to play the bad movie again and again.

3. How a 25-Year-Old Company Became an AI Darling Overnight

If that was a bad experience for you, it's like watching a bad movie. Why would you play the bad movie again in your mind? Which is what you do, right? It is so nonsensical. Learn from it. Look forward. Believe that tomorrow is always going to be better than today. At a minimum, life gets easier when you have that attitude.

You have the most calming presence I seriously have almost ever interviewed, which is astonishing. I've done, say, 3,000 interviews. When you say, “Look forward. Tomorrow is going to be better than today”—

K.R. Sridhar

The interesting thing with this business is that it's 25 years old. It's become a darling in the last 2 years, whatever we want to call that time frame.

Did you always know this time was going to happen, or, respectfully, was it a market moving in directions we couldn't anticipate?

K.R. Sridhar

If you look at my 2001 PowerPoint presentation, which was the pitch to Kleiner Perkins, my first investor, John Doerr, the summary page puts out a data center. It puts out a Bloom Box powering the data center, the waste heat providing the cooling for the data center, and it being connected to nothing else.

What we're doing today—the reason it's becoming the darling—is that those data centers are finally waking up and saying, “This is the right solution for us.” For me, the period between 2001 and now, the 25 years, was never a question of if. It was a question of when and how soon.

Did you ever doubt it? I mean, 25 years is astonishing, K.R.

K.R. Sridhar

There was not a single night I went home and worried about the company surviving or doing well, or whether I had made a mistake jumping into this field. There were several days, several times, when the company had existential threats to it that we had to overcome. But in my mind, again, failure was never an option.

I really never once worried about whether, when we wake up tomorrow morning, we're going to be better off than we were the previous day.

4. The Andy Grove Moment That Changed How KR Leads

You mentioned John Doerr, an incredible individual. You've had several incredible individuals be part of the journey. I read that there was an Andy Grove moment that really shaped your thinking on leadership. Can you tell me about that moment and how it shaped your leadership?

K.R. Sridhar

Sure. I'm a technologist. I used to be a rocket scientist. So, here I am starting a company. When I started the company, if you had said “P&L,” “EBITDA,” and all those financial terms, I wouldn't even know what that meant. I learned along the way.

Here I am: I know how to build one-off, and really well, because that's what we did for the space missions. That's what we did in our university labs. So, we built those one-off, two-off of the first Bloom Boxes that are out there working at Google and other places, doing very well.

After we built the first 5, the engineers and I said, “We can now hand it off to manufacturing and ask them to make it.” Little did we know that our engineering intent, our design intent, everything we knew had to be written up in such elaborate terms, in terms of manufacturing instructions, for somebody who's just a technician who does not know the engineering content but will do exactly what they're being told to make these boxes.

So, we built the next 10, the next 20. They're all going out in the field and failing spectacularly. It's a shock because, in those early days, they're expensive first units and reputation is on the line.

I said, “This cannot scale.” So, I stopped production, called my board, and said, “I need help. I need people to come and help me tell me how to do manufacturing. I don't know.”

One of the people who came was Andy Grove, who became a great friend and a mentor, and a Valley legend. There were also some other manufacturing gurus. One of them was on my board.

We were asked to compile all the data we had. We had three-ring binder after three-ring binder. Now, we're talking about a time when we still used paper for everything, right? We had them all packed. We had an entire executive team sitting on one side of a large boardroom, and these great advisors sitting on the other side, including Andy Grove.

We had dinner ordered, and all these stacks. We were thinking we were going to stay up all night until we solved the problem. We all sit down, and as soon as we start talking—I don't know that we finished the first sentence—he says, “Can we stop for a minute?”

He says, “Can everybody else in the room leave?” The executive team leaves, other than K.R. I have this group of luminaries sitting on the other side and me sitting on this side. It almost looks like a firing squad.

Then Andy says, “What's wrong?” I begin to explain what I think may be wrong. He says, “No, no, stop. What's wrong?” I say something else, thinking that I didn't get through to him properly.

After the third time, he's like, “K.R.,” and he just leans over and says, “I want to know what's wrong with you.”

It shocks me. I sit back and go, “I'm trying to build a great device that's going to be beneficial to people. I don't know what's wrong with me.”

He says, “You're such a smart guy. You built this technology that's just absolutely amazing. If you walk the floors and talk to the people out there, they are going to tell you why it's not working, because they don't understand what they're building. Have you talked to people, and have they told you what they don't know?”

It dawns on me that I've never done that. Then he says, “I know all these other guys want to go through those training binders. None of us know your product better than you. If you're smart enough to design it, you'll be smart enough to figure it out. Don't waste your time listening to everybody else and me. Go figure it out.”

That was the best piece of advice I ever got.

What do you take from that, walking the floor? It's proximity to customers; it's proximity to the team. How did that shape how you think about your forward mindset?

K.R. Sridhar

Great question. This is not just about the shop floor. What Andy Grove was teaching you was that you need to have the empathy to be able to relate to every aspect of your business.

When you develop that empathy, and when you practice that empathy by walking on the floor and talking to your shop-floor team members who are building your product, they will tell you things. The things they tell you are going to make the difference between you being a good company and a great company.

You do the same thing with your customers. You don't tell them why your product is great and why they should buy it. You go there to find out what their pain is and what problems they want you to solve for them. That's empathy. Then you design your product accordingly.

Here's what I can tell you: I walk there, talk to our shop-floor employees, and tell them why it matters—tell them why what they do matters.

When I toast these days, whether at an all-hands meeting or at a dinner party with executives, I always remember to say, “We're toasting right now this great champagne, or whatever it is that we're toasting, but we're able to do this because there are some technicians on the floor right now.”

Nobody's policing them, but their pride and dedication are. They're building an amazing product. Let's toast to them.

5. Are We in an AI Infrastructure Bubble?

I love that, and I love the human—again, it's an amazing, calming presence that you have. I was watching some of your other interviews before this, and candidly, you said that AI-driven power demand is secular and enduring. I have many great people on the show, and they talk about infrastructure bubbles and the inevitability of falters. Are we in an AI infrastructure bubble when you look at it from your perspective, as blunt as that is?

K.R. Sridhar

People confuse markets, stock prices, infrastructure, and secular changes. The stock market is going to go through whatever it goes through. Any revolution—and I would call AI absolutely a revolution—is almost a hockey stick on a hockey stick.

Technology itself, digitization itself, was on a hockey stick in terms of us going from mechanical-age infrastructure to digital infrastructure. AI has come and put a hockey stick on that hockey stick. So that's what we're experiencing.

Anything going at that speed—will it have bumps along the road? Will it have pauses along the way? Most probably, yes. We don't know of anything else in human history of this scale and magnitude, but it is the trajectory. Is the normal course after the course correction still going to be this phenomenal course? I absolutely believe so.

Because, for the first time in human history, we are manufacturing intelligence. When was the last time any person anywhere in any civilization said, "We have too much intelligence; let's stop"?

Never.

K.R. Sridhar

So, I think this is going to be ubiquitous.

6. When Intelligence Is Abundant, What Becomes Scarce?

When intelligence becomes ubiquitous and abundant—

K.R. Sridhar

Mm-hmm.

—which was the scarce resource—

K.R. Sridhar

Mm-hmm.

—what becomes the valuable asset if intelligence is ubiquitous and abundant?

K.R. Sridhar

Wisdom.

You know, AI is not going to give you wisdom. AI is not going to give you happiness. AI is not going to give you empathy to relate to people the way you need to.

At the end of the day, a bot giving you counseling is not going to be the same as you and me sitting here talking to each other, looking at each other, understanding the facial expressions, and relating to one another. Humans are social animals.

7. The Single Biggest Bottleneck: Regulation Is Now the Enemy of Growth

When you look at what you do today, what's the single biggest bottleneck that you face most consistently?

K.R. Sridhar

The single biggest bottleneck that I would say we face in terms of introducing a new concept into society is the friction associated with new ideas. On a big macro scale, for good reasons, very large infrastructure in the world has been designed and regulated to move slowly.

We are entering an age where that huge amount of regulation that intentionally creates friction in the process—which was beneficial in the past—becomes an impediment to our growth. I'm particularly sensitive to that because I'm here on the European continent.

We specialize in this.

K.R. Sridhar

Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, you get an A+ for—

We had to get a permit to come up the stairs, actually. It took a while.

K.R. Sridhar

Yeah.

Gavin Baker, who's obviously a very prominent thought leader in the space and a brilliant investor, did articulate how those permitting and regulatory challenges have actually almost helped because they throttled supply to allow it to grow in lockstep. If we had unlimited supply straight away, it would actually create more problems. Do you agree with that, or do you think it actually just continues to be an inhibitor?

K.R. Sridhar

Look, in an asymmetric world, where not every player views regulation and growth at that level, I don't think I would agree with him. If that was a global phenomenon and everybody on the planet agreed that we would throttle and move at a particular speed, that's a different story. But that's utopia. That never happens.

Being left behind because a particular country or geography throttled it, when somebody else moved at breakneck speed, becomes a real detriment to the region that throttled it.

Is there a chance that the US will be left behind because of the regulatory permitting provisions that are in place, when viewed in context against Asia or China in particular, where they have amazing model development and the permitting and regulatory environment is honestly not inhibiting them at all?

K.R. Sridhar

If everything else were equal, what you're saying would absolutely be true. But the creative prowess and innovative entrepreneurial spirit that you see in the United States is still a major trump card that the US has over any other place in the world today.

I would say that human spirit is going to be able to overcome whatever other obstacles we have. So I would say, don't short the US. Don't short Silicon Valley.

Yeah, it's never a good idea.

K.R. Sridhar

Never a good idea.

8. The Next Big Crisis Nobody Is Talking About: Energy Poverty

It's not paid well. What would be a very pronounced bottleneck in 5 years' time that we're not really talking about today?

K.R. Sridhar

Societally and globally, I would say the largest bottleneck would be bringing the people who are left behind to some level of parity. There will always be gaps.

But what's happening for the first time in human history—it's not even in technology history—is that, next to air, water, shelter, and food, electricity becomes almost a necessity for a young kid being born today to have a decent modern life in this digital world.

There are significant swaths of this world that don't have access to, or affordability for, that power. When we look 5 years from now, the need to bring that level of access and affordability is going to be super important.

We're both in slightly rarefied air in terms of the events we go to and the people we spend time with. Candidly, I just see a smaller and smaller number of people make more and more money.

Do you not see the same? As sad as it is, I think AI is doing more to concentrate wealth than it is to distribute it.

9. Is AI Concentrating Wealth or Democratising It?

K.R. Sridhar

I wouldn't disagree with you on the fewer number of companies that are going to make an unbelievable amount of financial success out of AI. However, there is no known methodology to raise all boats in the world other than technology.

Technology has been the best equalizer in the history of mankind. Just think about infant mortality. Think about hunger, clean water, health care, and the number of things we're able to cure. It's technology that's brought all that to most people in the world.

There is probably no force in the world other than technology that has done that for so many people at such a large scale. Is there inequity between the best health care and the lowest level of health care? The answer is yes. But has the health care of every living person on the planet gotten a lot better than it was because of technological advances? The answer is yes.

I agree. And so, the powerful lever is bringing people along and stopping them from feeling like they are an isolated majority who are now not part of the revolution.

K.R. Sridhar

So, I think you're touching on something super important, which is abundance. If you think about the previous revolution we had, which was the mechanical-age, industrial-age revolution, it was still, for the most part, a fixed pie.

In that fixed pie, if you got a bigger slice of it, I got a smaller slice of it. So it was a zero-sum game. When you create abundance, like the intelligence abundance we're talking about, abundance just changes the entire framing. You getting a larger piece of the pie is not coming at my expense. We just have to include all the people.

10. Should Governments Own Equity in the Biggest AI Companies?

Can I ask an interesting one that I actually got asked on TV the other day and was slightly taken aback by? I wasn't expecting it. You know, when they throw things at you, you're kind of exactly like this, and you're like, "God, I wasn't expecting that."

We've seen some suggestions that governments should own part of the largest AI companies to bring people with them. What do you think of that as an initiative? Is it normally a nice marketing message that carries no weight, or is it actually meaningful for people to feel like they have ownership in these companies?

K.R. Sridhar

Here's the thing about company tech ownership, right? The top 20 most important companies—that list changes every 10 years in the US. It's so unlike the EU, where practically new companies have rarely come on and displaced existing, older companies.

I see the world more and more as not being monopolized by single large companies. Microsoft used to be considered a monopoly, and everybody was afraid of it. No longer. Google was considered to be the monopoly. No longer.

So, I don't see regulation having to come in. The only thing regulation can do, in my opinion, is stop that innovative culture. If the government took major equity shares in a company and, because of that, provided unfair access for those companies to its products and its people, by definition, they're stopping the startups who have better ideas from coming and competing for it.

I think free competition—going back to the first question you asked me, winning and losing—you want to win. And if you want entrepreneurs to win, you have to give them at least a sense that they're playing on a level playing field.

11. Are Hyperscalers Secretly Becoming Energy Companies?

The challenge—and again, I'm worried that we're seeing this concentration of value—is that it's been called the Magnificent 7, but MANGO, I think, is the new one, where it includes some other people. You just see this concentration of value toward them. I think it's 85% of year-to-date value accruals in those top names.

If you don’t have that, or any form of intervention, do you not just have the biggest companies getting bigger and bigger and running away with it?

K.R. Sridhar

I think there are many ways to come around it. Taking equity is the question you asked. I don’t think that’s the right model. But let’s get to the core issue, right?

The core issue is no new technology that’s come along ultimately created fewer jobs. I don’t think AI is going to be anything different. But when new technologies come along—from the agrarian revolution to the industrial revolution—the transition generation suffers. There’s collateral damage.

Because we are creating so much wealth, is there a way to take a portion of that wealth and make sure that the people caught in the transition don’t have to suffer as collateral damage? There should be a construct for political figures to figure out, right? There should be a construct. And I’m completely for that, because these are people who are suffering through no fault of their own.

We in Silicon Valley said, “Everybody, learn how to code, because if you don’t know how to code, you don’t have a future.” Okay? Suddenly, AI comes, and we are saying, “You coders have no future.”

Coders, you don’t need to do that.

K.R. Sridhar

Yeah, why are you doing that, right? So I think, as a society and as a technology industry, we should be empathetic to taking care of those people.

We mentioned some of the big names in terms of the biggest companies of our day. Their focus on energy, acquiring energy supply, is more important than ever. Are we seeing the hyperscalers secretly become energy companies in some ways?

K.R. Sridhar

Mhm. Here’s what’s interesting, right? We’re manufacturing intelligence, as we spoke about. And there’s never been a more high-value product manufactured with electricity than intelligence.

So the input into the factory, unlike a chemical factory where all these raw materials, ores, and other things come in and you process them, is simply electricity and data. And data’s everywhere. So the only real cost input coming in is electricity. The machines are the chips. The output is intelligence.

So this is the single largest input, and that input today is not abundant. Right? So clearly, electricity becomes the key factor. So herein I see it slightly differently.

I believe the fact that electricity became so important for this critical industry that knows how to move at speed and scale is going to mean that, since Edison—almost 150 years later—we are going to create a new construct for electricity in the world: more digital electricity, as opposed to mechanical-age electricity.

That digital electricity, for many reasons I can walk you through, is going to be more efficient, cleaner, and more reliable. And when these large companies, which have the resources to allow that kind of new electricity to happen at scale, do so, it’s going to trickle down to the masses everywhere.

Sub-Saharan Africa and Bangladesh, just to use examples of countries that are in the developing basket, are going to benefit from this. Just like an airbag comes in a very expensive car initially, and within a few years you see it in every car, it improves everybody’s lives.

So I’m super optimistic that if you look back 20 years from now, we will say AI was the best thing that happened, because of which electricity abundance happened to everybody on the planet. AI is just a catalyst, a stepping stone, and an accelerator.

You said before, speaking of that, about the ability to produce tens of gigawatts of power generation on the grid in a hurry. It was a quote. It’s a pretty big claim. How much can you actually deploy in a hurry—speed to production? How do you think about that, and how possible is it? Because scaling production is everything. How do you think about that?

K.R. Sridhar

Mhm. Look, we have developed a technology which does not use the traditional power-supply chains. The technologies we use are more akin to computer electronics and hardware. Right? It’s a solid-state device that makes the electricity.

So even at the tens of gigawatts, we will be single-digit percentages of the total supply chain that already exists to make other devices of a similar nature. When Steve Jobs comes and shows his first smartphone, nobody says, “Will you build 5,000 of these or 10,000 of this next year?” It’s in the millions. And there’s a supply chain that knows how to scale very fast.

That’s the supply chain we’re going to rely on. And that didn’t happen by accident. The company was built to light up the planet. That was the mission of the company. So everything we did in the company, including our manufacturing lines, was built for one day being able to scale and scale fast.

Now we are just opening that chapter and executing to that. It’s all about execution. And execution at that scale is not trivial. It’s not easy.

It’s just like what I learned the very first time I had to build a product with Andy Grove. But I’m still here to talk about that story, which means we are good learners. We learn how to get up when we fall.

So you are able to scale production to the tens of gigawatts in a way that other energy alternatives are not able to.

K.R. Sridhar

Exactly. [laughter]

12. Bloom's $20B Backlog & the Path to 2 Gigawatts

Hence the 1,200% increase in stock price. [laughter] It’s compelling. For you, is it—we spoke earlier about bottlenecks—is it simply regulation and permitting that prevents speed to power? Because your backlog book is insane. It’s like $20 billion, I think I read.

K.R. Sridhar

Yes. So look, here’s what happens, right? If you want to build a 2-gigawatt data center, it’s going to take you more than a year and a half to build a greenfield. There’s an entire supply chain for that, including construction workers and supply-chain parts related to that data center. They’re all being stressed right now.

There’s a lot of copper that goes inside a data center. There’s a supply-chain issue related to that. There’s a lot of cooling that goes inside a data center. There’s a supply-chain issue related to that. The tradespeople required to build these extremely large centers—there’s a supply chain related to that.

So it takes 12 to 18 months, at a minimum, to build something like that. We can stand up that power faster than they can build a data center. So our goal at Bloom is to say power should not be a bottleneck if you rely on us.

So what are our constraints? Number one, can they build their data center in time? Can we get the permits? And the third part is, we need gas. That gas supply needs to be able to come in. Those are the bottlenecks. I don’t see us delivering the product as a bottleneck right now.

When you think about your ability to build at scale, it would put you in a dominant, winning position. When you think about the winners that emerge from this incredible technology revolution, you have different layers of the stack. Is it the energy companies that produce this incredible power? Is it chip companies like NVIDIA? Is it model companies like Anthropic and OpenAI? When you think about value accrual in the space, what’s the utility and what’s the valuable resource?

K.R. Sridhar

At the end of the day, I would think almost all of the sectors are winners. It’s just what are the names in each one of those verticals that you mentioned, right? Because if that doesn’t exist, then you don’t build an ecosystem that sustains.

If there are only a couple of winners in this, AI is not going to become ubiquitous. And I absolutely believe AI will become ubiquitous, which means there’s an entire chain of winners.

Let’s start at the very right. At the very right is the consumer, the customer who procures it and finds greater value using that product than not using that product. So they have to be a winner.

Any business, all the way from a mom-and-pop restaurant or laundry store to a very large biomedical company or a cancer-care hospital, has to benefit from it. The people have to benefit from it. They’re all winners.

Then you start coming to the left. Almost everything in technology ultimately moves to the edge, closer to where people are. So it’s not just the large mega-data centers that we are talking about right now—the AI factories.

The AI factories ultimately need to have this distribution warehouse of intelligence. Those are the edge data centers residing in every neighborhood, like the one we are in right now. They become winners.

And then you have the people who develop all the services winning, because they’re the service providers that provide all this. Everybody who supports the ecosystem wins.

But to me, on the electricity side that you focused on, electricity is the one large infrastructure that’s not come to the edge. It’s always so far been very large power plants built very far away, with transmission and distribution coming in highways and surface streets to you.

How is it that electricity runs digital, but electricity alone doesn’t get smart? Doesn’t come to the edge? That’s what Bloom’s about. That’s the Bloom story.

We believe that bringing power to the edge has to happen. That is the digital transformation of electricity, and we are the only purpose-built, purpose-created company that created a technology and a platform that comes to the edge.

What does no one see about what happens when power comes to the edge?

K.R. Sridhar

What they don’t see today is that, in a world where everything is digital, having power outages for any reason is unacceptable. That’s like not having air to breathe.

Because, God forbid, somebody is doing surgery. That’s going to be a robot relying on all the data, everything coming electronically, and not having power at that moment is not an option.

If you have all the transportation logistics driverless and there's chaos, you cannot rely on some large data center far away with latency, because by then enough damage has happened. You cannot afford the latency, so that needs to happen at the edge.

When everything in life depends so intimately on that power not going off, a pole and a wire running across hundreds of miles, capable of disruption by Mother Nature and capable of destruction by bad actors—whether it's a cyber or physical attack—cannot be the only way that lifeline is delivered to you. Power has to be at the edge, without question, for us to realize the entire dream of the digital transformation.

I'm just struggling to reconcile why a lot of the world's biggest CEOs are telling me that power is the biggest problem.

K.R. Sridhar

Mhm.

13. The Long-Term Vision: Hydrogen, Distributed Power & True Energy Independence

I speak to you and I'm like, “Well, speak to my friend, K.R., because he's got unlimited power, it's at the edge, and he's able to provide it very sufficiently and well.” How do I reconcile “power is the problem” with your saying, “Hey, we can produce it in large quantities and bring it to the edge in a way that others can't”? Why are they still saying that?

K.R. Sridhar

It's a scale issue, right? Again, you're beginning to see the hockey stick, but it's the beginning stages. I completely sympathize with how you see it, and I agree with it.

Let's put this in perspective. Electricity in the world is a $5.5 trillion market. Last year, our revenues were $2 billion, so we need to catch up.

Well, you've got a long way to go.

K.R. Sridhar

Yeah. [Laughter] We have a long way to go.

But make no mistake: power at the edge is coming. It's going to be dominant, and it's going to transform the electricity industry. We're going to look back at this age and say AI accelerated that, and that's a good thing for everybody on the planet.

Because of 2 reasons, right? People talk about clean power. The only reason we tolerate power that's not clean is that it's out of sight, out of mind, somewhere far away. If it's outside your bedroom window, if it's outside your office window, you don't care what the regulations are. You want it to be clean. You want your children to breathe that clean air. So clean will become just second nature—table stakes.

There are so many other benefits that are going to come from having power at the edge. Anytime you develop power from, or transform power from, a molecule to electricity, there's heat associated with that. That heat in a large power plant gets wasted. When it's close to the edge, you use it for heating and you use it for cooling, so you're able to use that molecule in a much more efficient, much more sustainable manner.

It not only brings you control of your destiny, which you need; it also brings all the other good attributes of it. And when power is democratized, access is not restricted by people who are in power. That's true democracy.

My question on the back of that is, if I were the president and I put you in charge of policy and regulation, and I said, “K.R., make America a powerhouse for power,” what would you do differently that we're not doing today? I'm not asking you to critique any of the emissions, but what would you do to make America a powerhouse in policy and regulation around power?

K.R. Sridhar

I would break that up, like any other business plan, into a short-term, mid-term, and long-term.

The long-term vision for the world is that wherever you live, there's wind, solar, geothermal—something available. You use that electricity when nature gives it to you. Then you bottle that electricity when nature will not give it to you, in the form of hydrogen that you make right on-site. Then you recycle that hydrogen using something like Bloom to be able to get reliable, abundant power wherever you live.

The fact that you become self-reliant in any community, whether you live in Iceland or in sub-Saharan Africa, and don't depend on some lifeline—some logistic lifeline bringing you energy, which is critical to your well-being—is huge. That's the vision I have for the long term, and I'm super optimistic about that.

So, how do you facilitate that? In the immediate term, America is endowed with unbelievable amounts of natural gas, which is the best available molecule. Even though it has a carbon footprint, it is the cleanest, smallest-carbon-footprint molecule available.

We should be able, along with Australia, Canada, the UAE, and Qatar—the free world—to provide access to that gas to practically every country in the world. It is affordable and economical, so we don't have to burn coal. Good should not be the enemy of the best.

We should be able to provide that, and we should use boxes like what we built to be able to bring that distributed power to anybody on the planet. Let us not let people who don't have our best interests supply power to us, supply energy to us. That would be the immediate pathway I would tell the president: Let's bring free fuel from a free world to make more of the world free.

How criminal is it that we still buy so much energy from Russia, an adversary that we're openly funding—a competitor of ours—but we're still funding them by buying energy from them?

K.R. Sridhar

Exactly. So why would we need to do that? It is illogical. It's not rational. And there's a better way.

You mentioned the ability for a village in Iceland to store its own energy for when it's not abundant. We talk a lot about model sovereignty—we need our own models—and it strikes me that energy sovereignty is much more important. Would you agree that energy sovereignty is more important and the most important thing?

14. Energy Sovereignty Is More Important Than Model Sovereignty

K.R. Sridhar

I think of all the supply chains in the world, we pretty much know how to grow food wherever we are. So next after food, it's energy sovereignty. Period.

Look, if you just go back to the history of the world, big wars have been fought for water. If there's a river flowing through multiple countries, big wars have been fought for water rights. We know how to produce water. Big wars have been fought for food. We know how to produce food. Big wars are being fought for energy as we speak. And we can avoid that.

When we think about energy abundance for futuristic data centers in space, space is often proclaimed to be this holy grail—capturing energy from the sun. How much of a solution is that versus a bluntly unrealistic pipe dream?

K.R. Sridhar

I worked on the Mars missions.

I wasn't doubting it, K.R. I actually—

K.R. Sridhar

You can squeeze water out of a rock, but why? There are better ways to do that right now on Earth.

15. How Oracle Became Bloom's Biggest Customer

Can I ask you: Oracle has an enormous deal with you. How did Larry Ellison end up choosing solid oxide fuel cells to power Oracle data centers, and what did that conversation look like?

K.R. Sridhar

The proof is in the pudding, right? Before AI came along, we had at least 5 or 6 data center customers, and over a period of 10 to 12 years, we've been providing reliable power to edge data centers and other data centers—4 MW, 10 MW, 15 MW for a data center.

Our very first data center application was in 2013, when eBay—which used to be eBay and PayPal together—needed power. If you think about it, PayPal's entire business is that data center, because it's all about transactions, and all those transactions are happening in a data center.

They did not have power in Utah and they needed power. The choice was to move somewhere else, and they didn't want to move their location. So they relied on us. That was our first application of a mission-critical data center being powered fully by Bloom, and we built that reputation over time.

A couple of years ago, there was a data center in Utah that was being built and had to come online for Oracle's customer, but the power systems were delayed. They came to us and said, “Can you give us a temporary solution for a year?” We said, “Absolutely.”

We signed a contract with them that said, 90 days from the day we signed the contract, we would do 50+ MW, which is an unbelievable speed. We delivered that in 55 days instead of 90 days. Power on. They were thrilled with what they saw.

That formed the basis for them to say, “Why would we go and look for other solutions when we have a great solution that fits the bill?”

There are so many attributes of the Bloom system that are so well suited for a data center. Let me give you 2 or 3 simple examples so you can understand.

If you have a large turbine—let's say it's 500 MW, one single large turbine powering a 500 MW data center—that turbine's availability over a 20-year period, on a yearly basis, will be somewhere in the low 90s, around 90%, because you need to maintain the turbine. It's like your jet engine or your car. It has to stop. You have to maintain it.

What happens during the other 10%? Are you going to turn down the data center? You can't. The data center has to be always on. In the past, when data centers were small, you relied on the grid to be the backup. Now there is no grid that is a gigawatt in size that can be backing you up.

So what do you have to do? You have to put 2 turbines instead of 1, and have 1 as a backup for when the other fails or has to be overhauled.

With Bloom, we are tiny, modular power builders, each one 50 kilowatts. So you can hot-swap any one while the system is working, very similar to how a data center is built.

If you look at the architecture of the Bloom system, it's very much like the architecture of a data center. You have so many different server blades, and any one server blade going down does not take the data center down. There are so many racks, and any one rack going down does not take the entire data center down. Our architecture is exactly like that. So you don't have to overbuild us by anything more than a small percentage compared to the large turbines.

Number one. Number two, we're a solid-state device, which means we can ramp up and ramp down in power in milliseconds, which is what the AI loads need. AI loads are like the brain. Just think about it: our brain goes into huge activity, pulses, lots of energy, then it comes down. The same thing happens in an AI data center with all the GPUs.

Think about a turbine. Think about your car. Even if you have the fastest car, zero to 60 takes a few seconds because of the mechanical device that has to ramp up and ramp down. We are a solid-state device that can ramp up and down very fast. So all the batteries that they needed to provide this ramp, they don't need with Bloom.

And then we can scale as you go. You cannot put a partial turbine to power a data center as it's building and then keep adding turbine blades as the data center is ramping up. With Bloom, it's completely different. Just tell me what you need today, and as you're growing, we'll just keep adding the LEGO blocks.

So when I tell you that Bloom was purpose-built and purpose-designed for the digital infrastructure, it was truly done that way. The band-aids that you put on mechanical-age infrastructure, like turbines and engines, simply cannot do that. They saw all these advantages, and so it was a fairly easy conversation.

You said it at about 55 days, yeah, not 90. I mean, that is one hell of a shortcut. Amazingly done. When does the primary focus for customers move from speed to cost? And how price-sensitive are customers?

K. R. Sridhar

With electricity, go back to the context we talked about. It is the primary input to manufacturing intelligence. At the end of the day, when you look at it end to end, it's neither price nor cost—it's value. You're generating tokens. The token has a value. What's that entire stream look like, and how can you maximize the value?

The reason I'm saying that is the cost of electricity, as we used to think of it when the grid was supplying it, was based on one-size-fits-all electricity. What Bloom makes is designer electricity.

The one-size-fits-all electricity means that you buy that electricity and then you have to make all the alterations to that one-size-fits-all electricity. That's all the gear that you put in your data center, that you own, that you operate, and that you maintain. Those things fail, they create reliability issues, and you have to deal with all that and all the inefficiency associated with it.

With Bloom, we tailor-fit exactly what the needs for generating that token are. And the value we create—

And the benefit of being tailor-fitted versus one-size-fits-all and horizontal is—

K. R. Sridhar

The cost of the token generated, the amount of power needed for that, the amount of gas needed for that, the amount of copper needed for that, and the amount of other supply chain and tradesmen needed for that.

It's efficiency, the lack of wastage.

K. R. Sridhar

Entire efficiency. It's an entire stack efficiency—the full vertical stack. It's almost like custom-designing your furniture for your own home so that it fits perfectly, as opposed to just generic cubes.

Your backlog is 20 billion, and the manufacturing capacity is 1 gigawatt today.

K. R. Sridhar

Mm-hmm.

What's the manufacturing capacity by the end of this year?

K. R. Sridhar

We'll be over 2 gigawatts. We said that publicly. And what we also said is, going forward, we're not just going to ramp from 2 to another big step function or whatever. We have made this based on everything we see in the market today.

Think of it almost like an analog dial. Every month, every quarter, we're going to keep adding more capacity as we build. If you came to our factory, it's a state-of-the-art production facility, but it's also a state-of-the-art construction zone. They're both happening at the same time, and we're able to do that.

It's a state-of-the-art innovation area where we are innovating on our manufacturing processes so we can make it more efficient as we go forward, thanks to AI.

Can I ask, what does the scaling trajectory look like—1 gigawatt, 2 gigawatts by the end of the year, and by the end of '27? Is that 2 to 10? Is that grossly impossible?

K. R. Sridhar

Because we're a public company, we've not given forward guidance on that. So I don't feel comfortable giving you a number. But what we have promised to our customers and to the market is: you come in and put a firm deposit for power before you build your greenfield data center, and we'll have that power for you. We will not be the bottleneck.

Do you have a concentration in terms of customers and revenue when I look at a lot of the biggest businesses today?

K. R. Sridhar

No, we don't. We are signed up with multiple hyperscalers. We have signed up with multiple neoclouds, but more importantly, it's not just about not having an AI concentration. We have a robust commercial and industrial business.

We power factories. We power Home Depots, Costcos, and Walmarts. We power college campuses. Two-thirds of the Caltech campus is powered by us. Anybody who needs reliable power should use us.

One thing I'm interested in is that you've also become famous in social media circles because of Leo Apotheker and his investment in the company. Have you seen the effect of him being an ambassador on the company in terms of recognition, awareness, and employee recognition?

K. R. Sridhar

You know, the first time I knew about it was when my 22-year-old daughter showed me that all her friends were talking about it because of social media.

Yeah.

K. R. Sridhar

But I've liked Madan since. He's a very sharp, deep-thinking individual. I think he's got some tremendous ideas about where things are. We obviously agree with his thesis on Bloom.

16. Leo Aschenbrenne, Social Media & the Vision of Electricity for All

The impact, I think—look, it's going to come from multiple, multiple areas. This is a huge concept. The idea of distributed power coming to the edge is a concept that's going to change dramatically city planning, access, and the need for people to move from inaccessible areas to a metropolitan city just so their next generation can have a better life.

I don't think that's the way 10 billion people should live on the planet. Let me explain this. The only reason parents will leave their idyllic village settings and move into a city and live in paltry conditions is that they're willing to compromise their own lives so their kids have better access.

Why not bring the access right where they live? In a digital age, you can bring all the information; you can bring everything else there. If you brought electricity, I think it changes how the world can think about itself.

So you think we'll see a change in the distribution of people between cities and the countryside, and more will remain outside of cities because of the lack of need?

K. R. Sridhar

Yeah. Throughout human history, if you look at where people concentrated, it was for access. Anywhere there was a waterway—by rivers or by the coast—is where people settled, because waterways were a great way to trade.

Then you just look at the large railroads, you look at the big highways; where they intersect is where large cities are. That's where access is created. So access was created by people who controlled it, and they controlled where people lived.

If you can break that using distributed power, again going back to true democracy, you just democratize things. Any technology coming to the edge democratizes it. Your cellphone today is your personal device with only the things you want. Did the landline telephone ever give you that access? No. That's true democracy: technology bringing true democracy. If you're able to do that with power, it changes geopolitics.

17. What KR Has Changed His Mind on in the Last 3 Years

The business has changed a lot in the last 2 to 3 years. What have you most significantly changed your mind on in the last 2 to 3 years as a result of the incredible parabolic growth that you've seen?

K. R. Sridhar

Until the time when this big switch happened, we were a lot more internally focused. I did not spend much time talking about the bigger ideas and where this can ultimately go, because it was not the right time to do that.

Now we feel, as a company, that we have a larger mandate than just building the company, but also to speak about where the future can be in terms of electricity for all and abundance for all. So that's a big shift in my mindset. I'm spending more time speaking about it and talking to people about it.

I would be remiss not to ask this while I have the chance. You mentioned your children doing well and from social media. When I grow up, I want to be a K. R.—that's the takeaway I have from this conversation. And with that, you're the CEO of an incredible business. You're also a father. What would be your biggest parenting advice, having run a business for 25 years to the multi, multi, multi-billions? What's your biggest lesson and advice on how to do both so well?

K. R. Sridhar

I would say—this is what I would tell my kids—I would say, be good people and be happy. And just work on the things you're passionate about.

18. Quick Fire Round

I would love to do a quick-fire, speaking of passions. I love this round. What was your biggest lesson from working with John Doerr?

K. R. Sridhar

To dream big.

What's one widely held belief about AI that you think is completely wrong?

K. R. Sridhar

That it is going to diminish the number of jobs.

Who's the most underrated person in the energy transition who doesn't get enough spotlight?

K. R. Sridhar

I think it's the people who created horizontal drilling and figured out how to extract more gas and more oil in a clean way as a bridge to the future. That entire sector is underrated.

Which country is set up best to be a powerhouse in the next decade?

K. R. Sridhar

I think it's still the US.

Is Europe slightly screwed?

K. R. Sridhar

I think Europe is waking up faster than I would have expected because of AI, and I'm optimistic hearing both from the EU and UK about the changes they want to make. The key is going to be: can they really make the changes fast enough?

If you had unlimited money as a business, what would you do that you're not doing today?

K. R. Sridhar

We would be going to the rest of the world, where they don't have the upfront money and capital to buy our boxes and our infrastructure, putting that in, and collecting later from them once they benefit from it.

Mhm, that's interesting. How able are you to move at speed into Asia?

K. R. Sridhar

We are very well prepared to move anywhere in the world today, but it'll be a very focused effort. When we go to other countries, we'll always look for a partner in the country.

What do you think a lot about but you don't ever see, or see often, in the news?

K. R. Sridhar

Creating more equal access. Equity is different, but creating access is important. Giving everybody an opportunity is super important to me. What they make of that opportunity is up to them.

Over 25 years, what was the hardest time?

K. R. Sridhar

It was post-financial crisis. We had built a completely US supply chain, and because the Big Three automakers had failed, they were all unable to keep their promises to me because we were just a development company at that time. I had to, within months, find a Plan B for what was a strong Plan A 6 years in the making. It was a very difficult time to get through that.

[laughter]

Question one: What's the kindest thing anyone's ever done for you?

K. R. Sridhar

I was in China, in a remote part, and had a bad accident where I could have easily bled to death. I was driven to the hospital, and it was in a remote town.

Through my translator, with a few seconds of consciousness left, I said, “Get me a helicopter. Get me to Hong Kong.” I don't know the name of the doctor, but I vaguely remember his face in that state telling the interpreter, “Ask him to shut up. I'm going to stitch him up; otherwise, his body will be flown to Hong Kong.”

He stitched me up. When I look back, that was a very kind thing that he did for me—not listening to me.

[sighs]

Wow, that changes some perspective. Final one for you. What are you most excited about when you look forward to the next 10 years? I like to end on a theme of positivity. I think there's too much negativity in the world. What are you most excited for?

K. R. Sridhar

I truly believe we will look back at this huge hunger for power that AI created—and the wealthiest companies in the world wanting to get ahead—as the single most important reason for us to figure out digital power for the digital world, creating an abundance of power that's not in conflict with the environment and making it affordable.

Ultimately, there is no energy-poor country that's economically rich. If we create energy abundance, we create economic abundance, and that lifts all boats everywhere. So I'm super excited about that opportunity, and I almost have trouble sleeping—

[snorts]

K. R. Sridhar

—when I think about what a brilliant world that can be.

K.R., I've so loved doing this. Thank you so much for being so wonderfully thoughtful, brilliant, artistic with storytelling. You've been amazing, so I so appreciate it. Thank you so much.