Neocloud Nebius has signed a deal with US fuel cell company Bloom Energy to deploy its Solid Oxide Fuel Cell (SOFC) technology to help power its AI infrastructure buildout in the US.

As part of the agreement, Bloom’s SOFCs will provide Nebius with behind-the-meter electricity for its full-stack AI cloud platform. The first project in the agreement will see Bloom deploy 328MW of capacity to an undisclosed site. The deployment is expected to be operational sometime this year.

“Power remains a key constraint for AI infrastructure build-outs,” said Andrey Korolenko, chief product and infrastructure officer at Nebius. “We chose Bloom because their fuel cells solve that directly: Clean power with virtually no pollutants is deployed onsite, on the timelines our customers need, with the availability AI workloads require. We expect to put this technology to work alongside our infrastructure as we continue to scale our capacity.”

“AI workloads demand power infrastructure that matches the performance of the cloud platforms they run on,” added Aman Joshi, CCO at Bloom. “Our partnership with AI cloud leader Nebius brings together Bloom’s clean fuel cell technology and AI-native infrastructure, and helps deliver a community-friendly, high-performance solution at scale.”

Bloom is a leading provider of fuel cell solutions for the data center industry. Its SOFC fuel cells work by converting fuel into electricity via an electrochemical reaction, rather than combustion, which Bloom claims results in much higher efficiency and lower emissions. The cells are fuel agnostic. “Our platform works with natural gas, biogas, and hydrogen,” Aman Joshi, CCO at Bloom, told DCD last year.

According to the company, Bloom’s fuel cells are built to support higher-density AI workloads more efficiently, with a technology platform aligned to emerging standards such as 800V DC.

The deal with Nebius is Bloom’s latest in the data center space. Last month, it expanded an agreement with cloud firm Oracle to supply the firm with up to 2.8GW of capacity. The companies inked a deal last year for an initial 1.2GW of capacity, with deployments currently underway and expected to continue into next year.

Bloom has also signed deals with Equinix for deployments across 19 data centers with a capacity exceeding 100MW, as well as an agreement with US utility American Electric Power for up to 1GW of SOFCs to power AI data centers off-grid.

Last year, the company inked a $5 billion AI infrastructure partnership with global investment firm Brookfield, under which Brookfield will invest in the firm to support the development and deployment of its technology.

Nebius has a data center presence across the US, the Middle East, and Europe. As well as owning a data center in Mäntsälä, Finland, the company is currently leasing or set to lease capacity in the UK (London, in an Ark DC facility), France (Paris, Equinix), Israel (multiple locations, Mega Or), Iceland (Keflavik, Verne), and the US in New Jersey (Vineland, DataOne) and Missouri (Kansas City, Patmos). Last week, the firm announced plans for a second gigawatt-scale data center campus in the US