Meta inks deal for solar power at night, beamed from space

The race to secure electricity for AI models has reached new heights: Meta has signed an agreement with the startup Overview Energy that will allow a thousand satellites to beam infrared light to solar farms that power data centers at night.

In 2024, Meta’s data centers used more than 18,000 gigawatt hours of electricity – roughly enough to power more than 1.7 million American homes for a year – and the need for computing power is only increasing. The company has committed to building 30 gigawatts of renewable energy sources, with an emphasis on industrial-scale solar power plants.

Typically, data centers that use solar power must invest in battery storage or rely on other generation sources to operate at night.

Overview: A four-year-old team from Ashburn, Virginia that emerged from stealth in December has a different solution: The company is developing spacecraft that harvest abundant solar energy in space. It then plans to convert that energy into near-infrared light and send it to large enough solar farms – on the order of hundreds of megawatts – that can convert that light into electricity.

By using a broad infrared beam to power existing terrestrial solar infrastructure, Overview believes it can sidestep the technological, safety and regulatory issues that hamper the devil’s plans to send power to Earth via high-powered lasers or microwave beams. CEO Marc Berte says you can stare straight into the beam of his satellite without any ill effects.

The technology would increase the return on investment from building solar farms and reduce dependence on fossil fuels – if it can be deployed on a large scale.

Overview says it has already demonstrated power transfer to the ground from an aircraft and plans to launch a satellite into low Earth orbit in January 2028 to perform the first power transfer from space.

In today’s announcement, Meta said it has signed the first capacity reservation agreement with Overview to receive up to 1 gigawatt of power from the company’s spacecraft, although it is not clear whether any money has changed hands. Overview has developed a new benchmark for this contract: megawatt photons, the amount of light needed to generate a megawatt of electricity.

Berte expects to begin launching the satellites that would fulfill this promise in 2030, with the goal of sending 1,000 spacecraft into geosynchronous orbit, a high orbit in which each satellite remains fixed above the same point on Earth. He expects each of the company’s spacecraft to provide energy from space for more than a decade.

Once in space, the fleet of spacecraft will be able to cover about a third of the planet, according to Berte, with an initial deployment that will extend from the west coast of the United States to Western Europe. As the Earth rotates below and customer solar farms come in evening and night, Overview’s spacecraft should boost electricity generation with additional light from space.

Berte sees opportunities in combining both generation and transmission, with the flexibility to supply power to solar parks where and when it is most valuable.

“There is a big difference between participating in a particular energy market and participating in all energy markets,” Berte told TechCrunch.