Bloom Energy Corporation

Thank you for standing by. My name is Krista and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to Bloom Energy first quarter 2024 earnings 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'd like to ask a question during that time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. And if you'd like to withdraw that question, again, press star 1. Thank you. I will now turn the conference over to Ed Vallejo, Head of Investor Relations. Ed, you may begin your conference.

Thank you, and good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining us for Bloom Energy's first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. To supplement this conference call, we furnished our first quarter 2024 earnings press release with the SEC on Form 8K and have posted it, along with supplemental financial information that we will reference throughout this call to our investor relations website. During this conference call, both in our prepared remarks and in answers to your questions, we may make forward-looking statements that represent our expectations regarding future events and our future financial performance. These include statements about the company's business results, products, new markets, strategy, financial position, liquidity, and full year outlook for 2024. These statements are predictions based upon our expectations, estimates, and assumptions. However, as these statements deal with future events, they are subject to numerous known and unknown risks and uncertainties as discussed in detail in our documents filed with the SEC, including our most recently filed forms 10-K and 10-Q. We assume no obligation to revise any forward-looking statements made on today's call. During this call and in our first quarter 2024 earnings press release, we referred to GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. The non-GAAP financial measures are not prepared in accordance with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles and are in addition to and not a substitute for or superior to measures of financial performance prepared in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation between the GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures is included in our first quarter 2024 earnings press release available on our investor relations website. Joining me on the call today are K.R. Schroeder, Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer, Greg Cameron, our outgoing President and Chief Financial Officer, and Dan Berenbaum, our incoming Chief Financial Officer. K.R. will begin with an overview of our business, and then Greg will review the operating and financial highlights of the quarter, and Dan will review outlook for the year. And after our prepared remarks, we will have time to take your questions. I will now turn the call over to Kaos.

Hello everyone and thanks for joining us today. We had a good start to the year and we are seeing strong market interest, increasing momentum and robust commercial activity across diverse end markets. Q1 results are as I expected. Importantly, our strong operational performance and commercial activity augurs well for the next three quarters. As I see it, our business is tracking to the plan we laid out for the year. Business leaders are increasingly recognizing the severity and secularity of the power challenges we face. They now understand that time to power is a business imperative and grid cannot meet their growing power demands. They need to turn to distributed on-site power. There is increased recognition that natural gas is the only bridge fuel at scale and affordability for a decarbonized world. And for companies looking to reduce their carbon footprint and meet their emissions targets, Bloom offers the least carbon-intensive way of converting natural gas to electricity with virtually zero air pollution. As grid prices keep rising steadily in the U.S., Bloom's value proposition is becoming attractive even on a pure cost basis alone in more new markets. Such markets include regions of Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana where demand for power is growing, natural gas is available and a well-accepted fuel of choice, and our solutions are highly compelling for all electric and combined heat and power or CHP applications. The grid challenges and inadequacies are aggravated by a level of AI-related growth in data centers that is far beyond what anyone anticipated pre-ChatGPT. Bloom has a long track record of success in supporting data centers' power needs with over 200 megawatts of contracted and deployed orders. In the earnings call last quarter, I talked about our healthy commercial pipeline for data center power. I also talked about our opportunities falling in two categories, power needs arising from expansion of existing data centers and power for greenfield data centers that are being built for future needs, primarily AI. From a deal flow perspective, the existing data centers can often be contracted and deployed relatively quickly as a supporting infrastructure is in place and generally has minor permitting and permission hurdles. Contrast that to Greenfield data center opportunities with much bigger stamp sizes, permitting requirements, tenant and finance securement, grid interconnection queues, all leading to longer sales cycles but much higher revenue potential. In this regard, Bloom's bFlexible islanded mode power solution offers a Greenfield data center customer the ability to commence operation of their facilities without worrying about need or delays of grid interconnection. Let me give you an example of a deal where we were able to get the contract closed faster because it's an expansion of an existing facility. We are thrilled to announce today a major win on an expansion data center opportunity. Intel has been a customer of Bloom since 2014, and we have been powering their data center in Santa Clara, California, and their mission critical labs in Bangalore, India. In Santa Clara, California, Intel is adding to their existing Bloom server capacity significantly to make that location Silicon Valley's largest fuel cell powered high performance computing data center. On the larger stamp Greenfield data center deals, we still expect conversion of some of these opportunities in the second half of the year. The sales pipeline, is robust and growing. Bloom's opportunities from the AI revolution extend beyond the data centers. We can rapidly provide power to the AI supply chain, which has surging and growing energy needs. Since 2018, Bloom Energy has been providing clean, reliable power to Supermicro. a leading supplier of AI hardware for their rack integration facility in San Jose. Last year, Bloom Energy installed the first phase of a 10-megawatt contract for Unimicron of Taiwan, a leading developer of hardware solutions for the AI industry. We alleviated their time-to-power problem and enable them to meet their rapidly growing AI-related demands. Just last month, we announced that we would power Quanta's new multi-megawatt manufacturing facility in Fremont, California. Quanta is a leading global supplier of high-powered compute servers for AI data centers. The local power utility could not meet its power needs in a timely manner. Bloom's power solution is a fully islanded microgrid, which will power Quanta computers operations around the clock 24-7, 365 days a year. By leveraging Bloom Energy's innovative and modular microgrid solution, Quanta is eliminating utility-dependent delays and taking control of its destiny and maintain its competitive edge in the fast-paced AI market. The AI revolution creates one more tailwind for Bloom as AI-related players are able and prepared to pay a premium and use their leverage to procure and lock up merchant and utility power and solve their time to power issues, other industries are finding it harder and harder to get power for their growth needs. We have started seeing more customers inquiring about our products and solutions for this reason. As we look at international growth, Our approach has been to find the right markets, the right partners, and then scaling up with them. In Korea, we are seeing strength again after a temporary slowdown last year related to new policies being introduced. Our partner SK is confident about our future in Korea. We saw strong demand from SK in the first quarter. In Italy, we are very encouraged by the momentum we are building with Cefla, our partner for biogas-based CHP solutions. We are continuing to develop other opportunities in Europe and Asia. On the personal side, in April, we were very pleased to announce the appointment of Dan Berenbaum as Bloom's new chief financial officer. Dan's financial and operational career spans more than three decades. A Naval Academy graduate, Dan held executive level positions at publicly traded companies, including National Instruments, Micron, and Everspin. And before that, he spent 10 years on Wall Street as an analyst covering technology stocks. We are excited to have Dan on the team and know that he's the right person to help guide us in this next stage of our journey. With that, I'd also like to thank Greg Cameron for his service as Bloom CFO. He has enabled a smooth transition, as he promised, and all of us wish him great success in his new chapter that he'll commence soon. And now, I'll turn the call over to both Greg and Dan.