FuelCell Energy, Inc.

Hello, and thank you for standing by. My name is Tiffany, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Fuel Cell Energy first quarter of fiscal 2026 financial results conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during that time, Simply press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to turn the call over to Michael Bishop, Chief Financial Officer. Michael, please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us on the call today. This morning, Fuel Cell Energy released our financial results for the first quarter of fiscal year 2026 and our earnings press release is available on the investor section of our website at www.fuelcellenergy.com. In addition to this call and our earnings press release, we have posted a slide presentation on our website. The webcast is being recorded and will be available for replay on our website approximately two hours after we conclude. Before we begin, Please note that some information you will hear or be provided with today consists of forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Such statements express our expectations, beliefs, and intentions regarding the future and include statements concerning our anticipated financial results, plans, and expectations regarding the continuing development commercialization and financing of our fuel cell technology, our anticipated market opportunities, and our business plans and strategies. Our actual future results could differ materially from those described or implied by such forward-looking statements because of a number of risks and uncertainties. More information regarding such risks and uncertainties is available in the Safe Harbor Statement in the slide presentation and in our filings with the SEC, particularly the risk factor section of our most recent Form 10-K and any subsequently filed quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. During this call, we'll be discussing certain non-GAAP financial measures and we refer you to our website, our earnings press release, and the appendix of the slide presentation for the reconciliation of those measures to GAAP financial measures. Our earnings press release and a copy of today's webcast presentation are available on our website under the Investor Relations tab. For this call, I'm joined by Jason Few, our President and Chief Executive Officer. Following our prepared remarks, the leadership team will be available to take your questions. I will now hand the call over to Jason for opening remarks. Jason?

Good morning, everyone, and thank you, Mike. I appreciate everyone joining us today. Before we begin, I want to acknowledge the events unfolding in the Middle East. Our thoughts are with the civilians affected across the region And we are grateful for the courage and service of the American men and women in uniform and those of our allies working to protect stability and safeguard lives. We hope for the safety of all innocent people and for a path toward peace. With that said, I'd like to turn to Fuel Cell Energy's results and the progress our team continues to make. Let me set the stage before we dive into the quarter. Fuel cell energy delivers continuous scalable power for critical applications and grid resilience. Our mission remains unchanged. However, the world around us is changing rapidly. The explosive growth of AI, digital infrastructure, and compute intensive workloads collides with a power system that can't scale quickly enough. Interconnection timelines now take years instead of months, and customers simply can't wait that long. This environment demands solutions that are proven scalable and ready to deploy immediately. And that's where fuel cell energy excels. We don't need to prove the need for distributed baseload power with our solutions. We've already demonstrated it over decades in utility scale, real world and demanding environments. Please turn to slide four. I will focus today's discussion on a few key themes. First, commercially. Data centers are driving demand for power that doesn't depend on grid timing in the commercial sector. Our DC native continuous platform is a ready backbone for data centers. We're seeing this shift reflected not just in conversations, but in the types of projects actively entering our pipeline. Second, operationally. Our momentum in South Korea is demonstrated by us servicing the largest fuel cell plant in the world at nearly 60 megawatts and our collaboration under a 100 megawatt data center MOU. Additionally, we are moving carbon capture from concept to deployment. And at the ExxonMobil ESSO refinery in Rotterdam, we will demonstrate what our platform can do. Capture carbon from an external point source while simultaneously generating power, delivering usable thermal energy, and producing hydrogen. One integrated system, multiple revenue streams, and zero wasted energy. We are also implementing the initial phases of our U.S. manufacturing scale-up to meet growing power demand. Third, financially. Our strong liquidity position enables us to pursue this opportunity with discipline, prioritizing execution, proof, and long-term value creation. Across all three, we emphasize proof over promise. Let me begin with a commercial update by turning to slide six. Our value proposition rests on five fundamentals, accelerated time to power, scalability, capital preservation, native DC power efficiency, and accelerated returns. accelerated time to power we design our solutions to power up sites quickly giving customers reliable energy and enabling revenue generation in a much shorter time frame this speedy deployment without requiring grid connection eliminates typical delays so operations and monetizations start faster infrastructure grid scalability our technology allows seamless growth from initial megawatt-scale projects to hundreds of megawatts, ensuring infrastructure-grade reliability. As demand rises, our proven solution makes expansion efficient at scale. Capital preservation and regulatory resilience. Flexible, phased capital deployment means customers invest as they grow, minimizing risk. Our ultra-low emissions profile reduces permitting hurdles, making regulatory navigation easier. AI-native architecture. DC-native power backbone aligns perfectly with the requirements of AI and high-density compute workloads, eliminating inefficient AC-to-DC conversions. This compatibility supports next-generation data center design and maximizes systems efficiency. revenue and return acceleration. We are able to deliver faster returns by providing rapid time to power, greater usable capacity, and flexible capital deployment without relying on grid timing. Next, we will go one layer deeper on two of these areas, AI native architecture and efficiency through thermal integration by turning to slide seven. As AI workloads redefine power requirements, We help customers rethink power delivery inside their facilities. Our ability to deliver native DC output stands out. While most data centers operate internally on DC, most generation systems still require multiple AC to DC conversions before power reaches the rack. Each conversion adds cost, complexity, energy loss, heat, and potential failure points. By producing native DC power, Our platform reduces conversions, simplifies electrical architecture, and improves system efficiency and reliability, especially at the scale and density that AI demands. This shift is not theoretical. It is being articulated publicly by industry leaders. At the 2025 GPU Technology Conference, or GTC 2025 as it is known, in an interview with Data Center Dynamics, Jensen Wong, CEO of NVIDIA, stated, we're moving from tens of kilowatts per rack to hundreds of kilowatts and ultimately toward megawatt class racks. Power and cooling are now the fundamental constraints of AI infrastructure. Similarly, Gio Albertazzi, CEO of Vertiv, has publicly noted that rack densities are nearing one megawatt. As rack density approaches the megawatt class, infrastructure must scale in kind. Our 1.25 megawatt modular block delivers native DC output and aligns directly with a one megawatt rack architecture, enabling a more direct, efficient path from generation to compute. Time to power and power efficiency are no longer secondary considerations. They are gating factors for deployment. This is not just a future concept. DC ecosystems already thrive across EVs, renewables, and storage. Now, data center operators are actively asking a logical question. Should power generation align more directly with the way power is consumed? Turning to slide eight, it may sound counterintuitive for a power generation company to reduce electric demand, but this is exactly what our platform enables. In reality, it is a capital efficiency discussion. Cooling can represent approximately 25 to 30% of a data center total electricity consumption. And that percentage is rising as AI workloads increase rack density and thermal intensity. Cooling is essential, but it does not generate revenue. Every megawatt allocated to cooling is a megawatt not allocated to compute. Power usage effectiveness, or PUE, measures how much energy reaches IT equipment versus how much is consumed by supporting infrastructure. As density rise, managing PUE becomes a greater factor in data center economics. Our platform technology provides a differentiated solution. We produce high quality thermal energy as part of combined heat and power. When paired with absorption chilling, That heat, which would otherwise be rejected, is converted into chilled water to support cooling requirements. The result is an integrated power, heat, and cooling configuration that reduces electric cooling load, improves PUE, and will shift more available power to revenue generating compute. In constrained power environments, this is not incremental efficiency. It is a structural advantage. This quarter, We advanced our strategic collaboration with Sustainable Development Capital, SDCL. Together, we have identified up to 450 megawatts of discrete data center and distributed generation opportunities globally. Fuel Cell Energy will provide the power platform and long-term operating and service capability. SDCL brings institutional capital, structuring expertise, and infrastructure asset management. Our collaboration is designed to address what matters most to customers, proven technology, and a dependable execution at scale. We are advancing these opportunities with discipline, focusing on development milestones, managing risks deliberately, and will structure each project to create durable value for customers, partners, and shareholders alike. Please turn to slide 10. In the first quarter, We submitted more than 1.5 gigawatts of proposals, with data centers now making up over 80% of our pipeline. This reflects a structural shift in how customers are thinking about power, reliability, speed to deployment, and long-term risk mitigation. Our platform is well aligned with that demand. Our priority is disciplined conversion. We are focused on turning high-quality opportunities in our pipeline into contracted projects, building backlog with the right counterparties and financing structures, and progressing contracted projects to commercial operation. We will continue to emphasize durability over velocity, allocating capital and resources where risk-adjusted returns and execution certainty are strongest. Now let's turn to operations. south korea remains an important operational and commercial market for us and a clear proof point of scale module deliveries at go and get green energy company ltd or gge and china general nuclear or cgn drove our product revenue in the quarter revenue would have been approximately six million dollars higher had two modules been commissioned just days earlier Those two modules are now online and contributing to Q2 2026 revenue. Importantly, our projects in South Korea demonstrate what few platforms can. Utility scale deployments of multiple 20 megawatt plants and 58.8 megawatts operating reliably for an average of 10 years in market. The operating history matters. It is a tangible validation of scale, bankability, and execution. attributes increasingly required by data center customers globally. In addition, in connection with our collaboration under our MOU with Inuverse, supporting the AI Daegu Data Center in South Korea, Inuverse recently announced a meaningful step, the execution of a land purchase agreement with Daegu University for the development of an AI Daegu Data Center. The message is consistent. Customers are selecting platforms with demonstrated performance at scale and long-term operating credibility. We're moving carbon capture from development to deployment. In April, we expect to ship two carbon capture modules to the ExxonMobil Rotterdam integrated manufacturing site. This project will mark the first demonstration of carbonate fuel cells capturing carbon directly from an external emission source while simultaneously producing power, hydrogen, and usable thermal energy. That capability is not theoretical, and it is not replicated elsewhere. Our molten carbonate platform is uniquely able to capture carbon at the source while maintaining power density and generating multiple revenue or operational expense saving streams from the same asset. That integration has the potential to materially lower the net cost of capture. Later this year, we believe that differentiation will be on full display in Rotterdam. Captured CO2 can ultimately integrate into the Perthas infrastructure, a large-scale open access transport and storage network under development in the North Sea. We view this project not as a demonstration alone. but as a catalyst for commercialization. Carbon capture represents a second distinct growth factor for fuel cell energy, differentiated from distributed generation and complementary to it. It positions us in markets where customers require practical decarbonization solutions with economic durability. This is a capability that will place our platform in a different category. Carbon capture is core to our carbonate platform, creating a fundamentally different long-term pathway for customers facing tightening emission standards. We take a disciplined approach to manufacturing scale. At our Torrington, Connecticut facility, we are making the initial investments to advance from 100 megawatts per year of maximum annualized capacity today toward 350 megawatts. more than a threefold increase within our existing footprint. This capacity expansion leverages a predominantly U.S.-based supply chain, proven electrochemistry, no reliance on rare earth materials, and over 23 years of manufacturing and operating experience at utility scale. Importantly, we have demonstrated our ability to scale before. We have produced fuel cell stacks in Torrington and shipped them to South Korea for final assembly and conditioning, enabling localized value creation and logistics synergies. We applied the same model in Germany, manufacturing stacks domestically and supporting final assembly and deployment into the European market. We know how to expand capacity through modular replication and distributed assembly without building entirely new factories. Scale is not theoretical for us. It is execution we have already delivered. We expect to invest 20 to 30 million in fiscal year 2026 to support this optimization. Beyond that, expansion will be demand driven. We will build capacity in alignment with contracted volume and structure partner capital not ahead of it. Advanced manufacturing techniques including automation and modular replication, give us a clear pathway to scale efficiently toward one gigawatt and beyond. But we will do so deliberately, matching capital deployment to durable, financeable demand and maintaining stewardship of stockholder capital. Now, I'll hand it over to CFO Mike Bishop to discuss our Q1 financial performance.