Bloom Energy Brand Guidelines: From a NASA Mars Project to the “Bloom Box” Fuel Cell

A Mars project turned around.

Bloom Energy’s story starts with Mars. According to NASA Spinoff in 2010, K.R. Sridhar was director of the Space Technologies Laboratory at the University of Arizona when NASA’s Ames Research Center asked him to help sustain life on Mars. His team built a device that could use solar power to split water into oxygen for breathing and hydrogen for fuel. When the NASA Mars project ended in 2001, the team turned the idea around: instead of using electricity to make oxygen and fuel, it would use oxygen and fuel to make electricity.

That year, NASA Spinoff says, Sridhar’s team founded Ion America and opened research and development offices at the NASA Research Park at Ames, in California. In 2006 it delivered a 5-kilowatt fuel cell system to the SimCenter at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where the technology was demonstrated. English Wikipedia says the company was renamed Bloom Energy in 2006; by 2010, NASA Spinoff said, it was headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.

Bloom worked out of public view for years. English Wikipedia says the first 100-kilowatt commercial units went to Google in July 2008. On 24 February 2010 the company unveiled its Bloom Energy Server at eBay’s headquarters in San Jose, with Sridhar as chief executive, the Mercury News reported; Google was among the first companies to test the servers, and eBay had a set installed on its campus. The machine soon had a nickname, the “Bloom Box,” and a CBS 60 Minutes report.

Recognition followed. The University of Illinois, where Sridhar studied, reported that Time magazine had named the Bloom Box one of its Best 50 Inventions of 2010. Sridhar remains the company’s founder, chairman and chief executive, according to its website.

Sand, ink and heat.

Inside the Bloom Box are thin ceramic squares. NASA Spinoff described the cells in 2010 as square ceramic plates about the size of old computer floppy disks, made from an inexpensive sand-like powder and coated with special inks: lime green on the anode side, black on the cathode side. Each produced about 25 watts. Stacked with metal plates between them, the cells formed stacks, and stacks formed the server, which NASA Spinoff said had the footprint of a parking space in its 100-kilowatt ES-5000 form. The University of Illinois called the idea “powder to power.”

These are solid oxide fuel cells. They run hot, which, according to NASA Spinoff, lets the server use natural gas, biogas or methane from landfills and farms. English Wikipedia adds that Bloom’s systems can also run on hydrogen, and that its fuel cells are installed at customers’ sites to supply power there, often under long-term contracts; from 2011, it says, Bloom began selling the electricity its servers produce as well as the servers themselves.

The same chemistry can run in reverse. Bloom’s own timeline begins with the oxygen-making electrolyser Sridhar developed for NASA’s Mars missions, and English Wikipedia says that in November 2022 Bloom began making a high-volume commercial solid oxide electrolyser for hydrogen at its Delaware factory.

Manufacturing moved east and then grew in California. English Wikipedia says Bloom opened a factory in Newark, Delaware, in April 2012; the company dates the groundbreaking of its Delaware Manufacturing Center to 2012. In 2022, the company says, it opened a multi-gigawatt manufacturing facility in Fremont, California.

Design and documentation.

Hydrogen and fuel cell companies sell equipment that most people never see in use. An electrolyser splits water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity; a fuel cell runs the reaction the other way, turning hydrogen into electricity. In the PEM designs made by several firms in this guide, the work happens in stacks of thin membranes and plates, assembled into larger systems that are often delivered in standard shipping containers, painted white or pale grey and lined up in rows at an industrial site.

That makes the sector’s public image a matter of pictures and words more than products. Company websites lean on photographs of factory floors, stacks being assembled, container rows beside wind turbines or refineries, and the vehicles that use the gas: hydrogen buses, delivery vans and, in the warehouse market, fuel-cell forklifts. Products tend to carry short, technical names, and greens and blues, suggesting water, air and renewable power, are a common choice.

The firms differ in what they actually make. Some build electrolysers to produce hydrogen; others build fuel cells to use it; and Plug Power says it covers production, storage, transport and use in one business. Several are listed companies, so their history is told as much in stock-exchange announcements, fundraisings and restructurings as in product launches, and a company’s own claims about capacity or cost should be read as claims.

The industry meets at trade fairs such as Hannover Messe in Germany and the Hydrogen Technology Expo, where stand design, demonstration stacks and project announcements do much of the brand work. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — who founded it, who owns it, where it makes its equipment — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From Sunnyvale to San Jose.

Bloom became a listed company in 2018, when, by its own account, it went public on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker BE. The same year it moved its headquarters. In April 2018 the Mercury News reported that Sunnyvale-based Bloom had leased several floors of a new office building in north San Jose; English Wikipedia says the move took place later that year, and San Jose remains its headquarters.

Its customers have changed with the times. Bloom’s timeline lists early deployments at Google, Walmart, Coca-Cola, FedEx and Bank of America; a first international project in Japan with SoftBank in 2013; and a community microgrid in Hartford, Connecticut, in 2016. More recently it has turned toward data centres. The company says it signed an agreement with American Electric Power in 2024 for up to one gigawatt of fuel cells, and that in 2025 it began working with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure on fuel cells at selected data centres; English Wikipedia reports a larger Oracle agreement announced in April 2026. In November 2026, according to Bloom’s newsroom, NTT DATA announced an agreement with Bloom covering 900 megawatts of onsite power across data centre projects.

The product itself is plain. English Wikipedia describes Bloom’s fuel cells as housed in metal cabinets, each producing about 200 to 300 kilowatts, which can be grouped as a microgrid for a site or clustered into a larger installation; data centres, health centres and factories are among the users it names.

For a design guide, Bloom Energy shows how a technical machine can carry a friendly nickname. Compare FuelCell Energy, another American fuel cell maker, and Ceres Power, a British solid oxide developer that licenses its cell. For this guide we use a leaf green, a lime and black with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Bloom Energy’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.