Plug Power Turns to Asset Sales as Cash Position Slides
Plug Power's unrestricted cash fell to roughly $162 million at quarter-end, down from $223 million three months earlier, pushing the company to lean on asset sales for liquidity.
Plug Power (PLUG) disclosed two new asset-monetization deals this quarter as its cash balance continued to shrink, a combination that marks a shift from the organic cost-cutting the hydrogen-fuel-cell maker had emphasized through 2025. The company agreed to sell its Graham, Texas Project, which includes 164 megawatts of grid interconnection assets, to Stream for up to $76.5 million, and restructured the sale of its New York Gateway Project into a staged closing.
The New York Gateway deal illustrates the shift. Plug Power had told investors in the prior quarter that the roughly $142 million transaction would close in June 2026; the anchor release instead splits it into a near-term land sale with the non-land assets pushed to a long-stop date of March 31, 2027. Together with Graham, the two deals are expected to deliver more than $80 million in near-term incremental liquidity as part of a broadened initiative that now exceeds the $275 million target first cited two quarters earlier.
The urgency behind that push showed up in the balance sheet. Unrestricted cash stood at approximately $162 million as of June 30, 2026, down from $223 million at the end of the first quarter and $368.5 million at the end of 2025 — a decline of roughly $206 million over two quarters, before accounting for proceeds from the newly announced sales. Total cash including restricted balances had already fallen from $993.98 million at year-end 2025 to $802.0 million at March 31, 2026, with $150 million of operating cash used in that quarter alone.
Revenue growth decelerated alongside the cash decline. First-quarter 2026 revenue rose 22% year-over-year to $163.5 million, down from Q4 2025's 27.2% sequential jump to $225.2 million and representing a roughly 27% sequential drop from that fourth-quarter figure. Gross margin moved in the same direction: after Q4 2025 delivered the company's first positive gross profit, at $5.5 million or 2.4% of sales following Project Quantum Leap cost improvements, Q1 2026 slipped back to a GAAP gross loss of 13%, though that still marked a 42-percentage-point improvement from the (55%) margin a year earlier.
The net loss widened to $246.0 million in the first quarter from $196.9 million a year earlier, driven largely by a new non-cash charge of approximately $140 million tied to convertible-debt and warrant revaluations following the stock's price appreciation. Warrant liabilities, which did not exist on the balance sheet at the end of 2024, reached $52.3 million by year-end 2025 and more than doubled to $107.0 million by March 31, 2026. Total assets fell to $2.368 billion from $2.595 billion over the same quarter, and stockholders' equity dropped to $774 million from $1.003 billion, extending the erosion that followed a $785 million impairment charge in 2025.
Adjusted per-share losses narrowed to $0.08 in the first quarter from $0.17 a year earlier, a smaller improvement than the swing to $0.06 from $0.29 that Q4 2025 had posted against its year-earlier period. GAAP loss per share came in at $0.18, versus $0.21 in the first quarter of 2025.
Management reiterated its target of reaching positive EBITDA by the fourth quarter of 2026, the same timeframe it has cited for three consecutive quarterly releases without acceleration or slippage. Full-year 2025 operating cash use of $535.8 million, down 26.5% from $728.6 million in 2024, serves as evidence of continued cost discipline, framing the new asset-sale program as an additional lever rather than a replacement for that trend.
Jose Luis Crespo, who became chief executive on March 2, 2026, succeeding Andy Marsh, is now overseeing the liquidity push alongside continued deployment of the company's electrolyzer business, which reached more than 320 megawatts installed globally, up from over 300 megawatts at the end of 2025.