Bloom Energy CEO K.R. Sridhar still recalls the tension in that 2009 meeting room. Three-ring binders stuffed with data lay open. His team had laid out every metric. Yet former Intel CEO Andy Grove ignored them all.
Sridhar, then pushing 50, had founded Bloom Energy just years earlier, adapting NASA tech meant for Mars to generate clean power on Earth. Manufacturing had hit a wall. Scalability eluded them. Desperate, he called in Grove, the Hungarian immigrant who turned Intel into a semiconductor giant.
Grove cleared the room. Only Sridhar and his board remained. “What’s wrong?” Grove asked. Once. Twice. Three times. Sridhar froze. Finally, Grove cut through: “You’re extremely bright, you’re extremely smart. You’re going to figure this out. You don’t need me coming here and looking at these three-ring binders to figure out what’s wrong.” The real issue? Sridhar hadn’t walked the factory floor. Hadn’t asked the workers building the fuel cells what wasn’t working. “They know something’s wrong, as they’re building for you,” Grove insisted. “Go to the floor and engage with the people, and learn from them what’s not working for them.”
“That’s a lesson I will take to my grave,” Sridhar told Fortune this week.
Sridhar’s path to that moment started far from Silicon Valley boardrooms. Born in India, he watched the 1970s oil embargo cripple his homeland. OPEC’s export bans to the U.S. and allies like India sparked shortages. As a teen, he vowed to end such dependency. He earned a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from NIT Trichy, then an M.S. in nuclear engineering and a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
By 1990, he was a professor at the University of Arizona, directing the Space Technologies Laboratory. NASA came calling. Sridhar advised the administrator on turning Mars’ CO2 atmosphere into oxygen for propulsion and life support. His team secured contracts for Mars exploration experiments. The tech: fuel cells that split gases using electricity, reversing to generate power. Perfect for a barren planet. Or, flipped, for Earth.
In 2001, he co-founded Ion America to bring that Mars tech home. Operations shifted to NASA Ames Research Center. By 2006, it became Bloom Energy. The fuel cells stack thin ceramic plates coated with catalysts. They run on natural gas or hydrogen, producing electricity without combustion. No moving parts. Low emissions.
Bloom’s Breakout—and the AI Power Surge
That Grove advice changed everything. Sridhar hit the floor. Workers revealed bottlenecks in assembly, material flaws, process gaps. Fixes followed. Bloom went public in 2018. Deployed over 1.5 gigawatts across 1,200 sites worldwide—enough for a million U.S. homes. Revenue hit $2.02 billion in 2025, up 37% from 2024, per the Fortune report.
Now valued at $65 billion, Bloom rides the AI wave. Data centers guzzle power. Hyperscalers demand reliable, on-site energy. Sridhar’s cells fit perfectly—modular, efficient, low-carbon. In March, Bloom stock soared amid AI plays, as CEO Sridhar noted “bring-your-own-power has shifted from a slogan to a business necessity for AI hyperscalers,” according to Finviz coverage of market surges.
But success didn’t come easy. Bloom burned cash for years. Sridhar built an outside advisory circle: FedEx’s Fred Smith, JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon, the late Tata Group’s Ratan Tata. “We could have died of 1,000 cuts,” he says. Yet conviction held. “There’s not a single night I went home and ever wondered about the future of this company. I knew there was only one option. You’re going to succeed.”
Grove’s lesson echoes in today’s executive suites. Data overwhelms. Spreadsheets lie. Frontline workers see truth daily. Intel under Grove thrived on such ground-level insight; his book High Output Management preached it. Sridhar applied it to scale fuel cells from lab prototypes to global deployments.
And it pays off now. Bloom partners with data center giants. Its servers power hyperscalers avoiding grid strains. As Semafor noted last year, Sridhar—mentored by Grove—pushes CEOs to prioritize power strategies amid AI’s energy hunger (Semafor).
Challenges persist. Profitability lagged until recently. Fuel cells compete with batteries, turbines, renewables. But Sridhar’s network and floor-level focus keep Bloom ahead. Grove died in 2016. His advice endures. In crises, skip the binders. Ask the builders.
Sridhar did. Bloom boomed.
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