Meta has struck two deals designed to address one of the most pressing bottlenecks in artificial intelligence: the electricity needed to run it around the clock.
The company announced partnerships with Overview Energy, a startup that plans to harvest sunlight from satellites in geosynchronous orbit and beam it to Earth, and Noon Energy, which is developing carbon-based battery storage systems capable of discharging for more than 100 hours.
Meta has reserved up to one gigawatt of space-based solar capacity from Overview and a separate one gigawatt of power with 100 gigawatt-hours of storage from Noon, making it one of the first major technology companies to secure capacity reservations for either technology.
A gigawatt is roughly equivalent to the output of a nuclear reactor.
The case for both investments rests on the limitations of existing clean energy.
"Solar depends on sunlight, wind depends on weather, and the grid still needs more storage to make the most of both," said Nat Sahlstrom, Meta's vice president of energy and sustainability.
Overview's satellites would sit approximately 22,000 miles above the equator in geosynchronous orbit, where they receive near-continuous sunlight with no nightfall, cloud cover or atmospheric interference.
The satellites convert sunlight into near-infrared light and transmit it to existing ground-based solar farms, which capture the beam using the same photovoltaic infrastructure they already use for direct sunlight, requiring no new land or grid connections.
The technology is unproven at commercial scale, and Overview has not yet launched an operational satellite, but Meta said the approach could come online faster than conventional power plant construction because it builds on infrastructure already in place.
Noon Energy's storage system uses modular reversible solid oxide fuel cells paired with a carbon-based storage medium, a chemistry designed to hold energy for days rather than the two to four hours typical of lithium-ion batteries.
A 25-megawatt pilot project is expected to be completed by 2028.
The partnerships sit alongside Meta's existing energy portfolio, which now exceeds 30 gigawatts of contracted clean and renewable power.
That includes geothermal agreements with Sage Geosystems and XGS Energy, and nuclear commitments with Vistra, TerraPower, Oklo and Constellation Energy totalling 7.7 gigawatts, making Meta one of the largest corporate purchasers of nuclear energy in American history.
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The diversity of the portfolio reflects how seriously the company views the energy constraint.
AI model training and inference consume electricity continuously, and the gap between what terrestrial renewables can deliver around the clock and what data centres need is growing as models scale.
The recap
- Company highlights limitations of terrestrial renewables for AI.
- Company highlights limits: solar depends on sunlight, wind on weather.
- Aim to meet rising artificial intelligence energy demand.