Meta turns to solar — again — in its data center-building boom
Technology companies may have been pronounced about their love for advanced nuclear energy – the flashy trend that the energy sector has introduced – but they continue to add renewable capacity.
Meta recently signed a deal with the Spanish renewable developer Zelestra for 595 Megawatt Zonne energy in Texas, only two weeks after signing a separate solar deal with Utility Company Engie. It is an important purchase for the technology company, which represents a bump of almost 5% for the 12-plus gigawatt of renewable capacity it is currently under contract.
The announcement comes as Meta -CEO Mark Zuckerberg maintains the ambitious AI strategy of the company -which requires substantial capital investments in data centers.
Meta racet to make its open-source Lama 4 model a rival of closed-source competitors such as OpenAi and Anthropic. And although Deepseek showed that models could be developed more efficiently, the approach does not necessarily apply to leading models such as Llama 4.
Meta is planning to spend $ 60 billion this year on capital investments, most of which would go to Datacenter infrastructure, and calls it a “strategic advantage” for the company, Zuckerberg said during a Wednesday call.
Like many of his colleagues, Meta bets that nuclear reactors can offer stable strength for his future calculation needs, whereby proposals for 1 to 4 Gigawatt capacity to come online at the beginning of 2030. One Gigawatt is enough to provide approximately 750,000 houses with electricity.
But the company cannot wait until then to add to the footprint of data center. Meta and others implement enormous sums of capital to build data centers, which, accordingly, require large amounts of electricity. The ChokePoint has some experts who predict that half of all new AI data centers will be subdivided by 2027.
Nuclear energy factories take years to build, and the newest harvest of advanced reactors still has to be proven commercially. Natural gas power plants are slightly faster.
Neither can compete with the speed of renewable implementation.
A solar farm can be brought online in just 18 months and because the technology is modular, parts of the power plant can deliver electricity before the last panel is connected.
That speed has enabled renewable energy sources such as wind, solar and grid scale battery storage to continue to achieve new contracts from technology companies. In addition to this week’s deal, Meta announced earlier this month that it bought 200 Megawatt Solar from Engie, who will be online later this year. Elsewhere, Microsoft helps to use $ 9 billion in renewable energy sources with Acadia Infrastructure Capital, while Google anchores a renewable $ 20 billion fund with Intersect Power and TPG Rise.
