The race to secure electricity for AI models has reached new heights: Meta has signed an agreement with the startup Overview Energy that could see a thousand satellites 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 its need for compute power is only increasing. The company has committed to building 30 gigawatts of renewable power sources, with a focus on industrial-scale solar power plants.
Typically, data centers turning to solar power must either invest in battery storage or rely on other generation sources to operate at night.
Overview, a four-year-old, Ashburn, Virginia, outfit that emerged from stealth in December, has a different solution: The company is developing spacecraft that collect plentiful solar power in space. It then plans to convert that energy to near-infrared light and beam it at sufficiently large solar farms—on the order of hundreds of megawatts—which can convert that light to electricity.
By using a wide, infrared beam to power existing terrestrial solar infrastructure, Overview thinks it can sidestep the technological challenges and safety and regulatory issues that bedevil plans to transmit power to Earth through high-power lasers or microwave beams. CEO Marc Berte says you’ll be able to stare right into his satellite’s beam with no ill effects.
The technology would increase the return on investment from building solar farms and reduce reliance on fossil fuels — if it can be deployed at scale.
Overview says it has already demonstrated power transmission to the ground from an aircraft, and is planning to launch a satellite to low Earth orbit in January 2028 to perform its first power transmission from space.
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In today’s announcement, Meta said it …