Meta-ink is about solar energy at night, beamed from space

The race to secure electricity for AI models has reached new heights: Meta has signed a deal with startup Overview Energy that could see a thousand satellites beaming infrared light to solar farms that power data centers at night.

By 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 computing power is only increasing. The company has committed to building 30 gigawatts of renewable energy with a focus on industrial-scale solar power plants.

Typically, data centers using solar energy must either invest in battery storage or rely on other sources of generation to operate at night.

Overview, a four-year-old Ashburn, Virginia, outfit that emerged from stealth in December, has another solution: The company is developing spacecraft that collect abundant solar energy in space. It then plans to convert this energy into near-infrared light and beam it onto sufficiently large solar farms – on the order of hundreds of megawatts – that can convert this light into electricity.

By using a broad, infrared beam to power existing ground-based solar infrastructure, Overview believes it can circumvent the technological challenges and safety and regulatory issues Bedevil plans to send power to Earth through high-power lasers or microwave beams. CEO Marc Berte says you’ll be able to stare directly into his satellite’s beam with no ill effects.

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

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

In today’s announcement, Meta said it signed the first capacity reservation agreement with Overview to receive up to 1 gigawatt of power from the company’s spacecraft, though it’s not clear if any money changed hands. Overview developed a new metric for this contract, megawatt photons, which is the amount of light required to generate one megawatt of electricity.

Berte expects to begin launching the satellites that would fulfill this commitment in 2030, with a goal of flying 1,000 spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit, a high orbit where each satellite remains fixed over the same point on Earth. He expects that each of the company’s spacecraft will provide power from space for more than 10 years.

Once in space, Berte says the fleet of spacecraft will be able to cover about a third of the planet, with an initial deployment that will reach from the West Coast of the United States across to Western Europe. As the Earth rotates below and customers’ solar farms come in during the evening and night, Overview’s spacecraft should increase their electrical output with additional light from space.

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

“There is a big difference between being in one energy market and being in all the energy markets,” Berte told TechCrunch.