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Bloom Energy soars amid parade of price target hikes
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Bloom Energy soars amid parade of post-earnings target hikes

Bloom’s share price is booming on Wednesday.

Better-than-expected earnings after the close yesterday kicked off a giant rally in Bloom Energy shares, as results from the AI energy and momentum play received a mixture of excitement and skepticism — there were a lot of questions about details of the company’s recently announced deal with Brookfield Asset Management — from Wall Street analysts.

Several raised price targets, but they also remained neutral on the stock after an incredible run over the last year that has pushed valuation metrics to extremely elevated levels. (HSBC did, however, slap a “buy” on the shares.)

Mizuho (Neutral, PT $79 -> $89): “We also come away constructive on their Brookfield deal (given wider nature beyond just fuel cell delivery), but await additional info on first sales. Our capacity expansion and revenue model is largely unchanged long term. We increase our price-target by 13% to $89 due to strong bookings and operating leverage.”

Clear Street (Hold, PT $43 -> $50): “We maintain our Hold rating because of valuation and the stock’s strong relative outperformance since we launched coverage 12 months ago (BE has outperformed the Russell 2000 Index by 1,064% since 10/31/24). We would like to see more incremental large orders from Oracle, AEP, Brookfield or AWS. We also deem the stock’s risk/reward not compelling enough here to warrant a Buy rating. However, we continue to like BE’s value proposition of its quicker time to power-up solutions and underlying sales growth tailwinds from datacenters & semiconductor manufacturing.”

BMO (Market Perform, PT $97 -> $136): “Bloom Energy beat 3Q estimates handily as it appears the company has already booked revenue for at least 1 if not more projects from its recent strategic agreement with Brookfield that was announced on October 13... That said, BE now trades at 26x our 2027E EBITDA AND assumes full utilization of 2 GWs for FY 2027. Our updated target is $136/share, and we remain Market Perform.”

Bank of America Securities (Underperform, PT $26): “A solid 3Q topline and margin beat (revenue $519M, +57% YoY; GM 30.4%), driven by AI-linked data-center deployments and early Brookfield JV projects. While MW growth and FY25 guidance upside validate commercial traction, we see this largely priced in amid consensus expectations for accelerating AI power demand. The quarter does little to resolve uncertainty around true project economics, cash conversion, and sustainability of Brookfield-driven volumes.”

RBC (Outperform, PT $123->$143)
: “We believe their remains continued positive demand momentum and believe BE is still in the very early stages of seeing broader adoption. PT to $143 from $123 on estimate revisions and multiple expansion. We believe the long term upside opportunity could be much greater with broader adoption.”

JPMorgan (Overweight, PT $90->$129): While the stock has significantly outperformed over the past few months, we maintain our Overweight rating and believe that additional contract announcements should provide further positive catalysts and potentially increased visibility into our unit shipment vs margin sensitivity analysis (see below). Our [year-end 2026] price target goes to $129, from $90.”

HSBC (Hold->Buy, PT $100->$150):
“Upgrade to Buy (from Hold) and raise [target price] to USD150 (from USD100). The increase in our [discounted cash flow-derived target price] is driven by the increase in our estimates, with our target based on an exit multiple assumption of 20x (unchanged) for our estimates beyond 2031 ... Bloom currently trades at 13x EV/sales versus its trailing two-year average of 3.4x per Bloomberg. We believe a premium multiple is warranted by the company’s exposure to secular growth themes of AI data centers and hydrogen, and improving margins and cash flow.”

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Southwest reports lower-than-expected Q1 earnings and revenue, declines to offer full-year profit update

Southwest Airlines reported its first-quarter earnings after the bell on Wednesday. Its shares fell more than 6% in after-hours trading.

For the first quarter, Southwest reported:

  • Adjusted earnings of $0.45 per share, compared to the $0.47 per share expected by Wall Street analysts polled by Factset.

  • Revenue of $7.25 billion, compared to estimates of $7.27 billion.

The carrier guided for adjusted earnings of between $0.35 and $0.65 per share for its second quarter, a range whose midpoint is below analyst estimates of $0.53 per share. Regarding its full-year 2026 earnings estimate of “at least” $4 per share, Southwest declined to give an update “given the ongoing macroeconomic uncertainty.”

“Achieving this outcome would require lower fuel prices and/or stronger revenue performance to offset higher fuel expense,” Southwest said.

Southwest introduced bag fees last year, ending a more than five-decade-long “bags fly free” policy. Earlier this month, less than a year after the change, it joined its major US rivals in hiking its bag fees by $10 amid surging jet fuel prices.

Southwest, which discontinued its fuel-hedging program last year, said it spent $1.36 billion on fuel and related taxes in the first quarter, up 8.6% year over year.

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ServiceNow dives after reporting sequential decline in profit margins

Cloud software giant ServiceNow — which has been something of a poster child for the AI-related software sell-off — saw its shares fall sharply after delivering Q1 results that included a quarter-on-quarter decline in profit margins.

The company reported:

  • Revenue of $3.77 billion, higher than the $3.75 billion analyst consensus estimate published by FactSet.

  • Diluted adjusted earnings of $0.97 per share, on point with the $0.97 analysts had expected.

  • Subscription revenue of $3.67 billion vs. the $3.65 billion predicted.

  • Non-GAAP gross margins of 79.5%, down from 80.5% in Q4.

ServiceNow issued guidance for Q2 subscription revenues of between $3.815 billion and $3.820 billion, compared to the $3.75 billion FactSet consensus estimate.

ServiceNow shares have been at the epicenter of the software sell-off driven by the fear that such companies are at risk of being rendered obsolete by AI. The stock was down 33% for the year through the end of the New York trading session on Wednesday.

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IBM falls despite posting better-than-expected Q1 results

Big Blue fell in after-hours trading despite reporting better-than-expected Q1 results, as it didn’t include in the release an internal metric it typically discloses to track the progress of its AI business. IBM reported: 

  • Q1 revenue of $15.92 billion vs. the $15.63 billion FactSet consensus estimate.

  • Adjusted earnings per share of $1.91 vs. the $1.81 consensus expectation.

  • Sales of $7.05 billion at its key, high-margin software segment vs. a $6.98 billion consensus of nine analyst estimates.

  • Sales of $3.33 billion in its infrastructure unit, which houses its growing AI mainframe business, vs. a $3.13 billion consensus estimate.

Unlike recent earnings statements, the company made no mention of an internal metric it used to track its progress in AI, which it called its “generative AI book of business.” That metric stood at $12.5 billion at the end of 2025, per the company.

The infrastructure business is of acute interest to the market, after AI giant Anthropic announced in February that Claude Code could efficiently modernize code bases in the COBOL programming language, which serves as a cornerstone of IBM’s enterprise mainframe business. The language is still widely used in certain industries, such as airlines and finance. (ATMs, for instance, run almost entirely on COBOL.) 

Anthropic’s COBOL announcement cut the legs out from under IBM. The stock plunged 13% on February 23, the day of the announcement — its worst daily drop in more than 25 years. And it was down roughly 15% for the year through the end of trading Wednesday.

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