Plug Power’s ascent continues as the AI boom may finally be what makes its business profitable

Plug Power has the most interesting stock chart on the planet.

It has the most interesting stock chart on the planet because it’s enjoyed several runs as a meme stock, but the ability to dream on the hydrogen fuel cell company has always run into the pesky problem of reality: Plug has rarely been able to achieve positive unit economics in its long history as a publicly traded company, as its technology has not been sufficiently cost competitive relative to established power sources.

But a world craving more power to accommodate the influx of data centers might mean that for once, Plug investors don’t have to dream in the abstract.

On Friday, HC Wainwright analyst Amit Dayal spotlighted this dynamic in upping his price target to $7 from $3, the highest on Wall Street, which set off record call activity in the stock.

Amid rising energy demand, Plug’s offerings begin to look “increasingly price-competitive and case for adoption becomes stronger,” he wrote.

Shares are surging on Monday, continuing to build on what’s one of the best months of performance from Plug Power in its history. Volumes and call activity have likewise been going parabolic, and the options action is aggressively tilted toward the bullish side.

Peer Bloom Energy has cashed in on the AI boom in a concrete way, striking a deal to deliver power to some of Oracle’s data centers, which accelerated the surge in its stock.

Plug, for its part, was inching its way into the data center business before ChatGPT was even released by providing backup power to Microsoft.

More recently, Plug’s technology was utilized as part of a collaboration between data center company ECL and AI training and inference cloud company Lambda to deploy “the industry’s first hydrogen-powered, production-grade Nvidia GB300 NVL72 systems,” which came online in late September.