Metaink uses solar power from space at night

The race to secure power for AI models is reaching new heights. Meta has signed an agreement with startup Overview Energy. This could allow 1,000 satellites to shine infrared light onto solar power plants that power data centers at night.

In 2024, Meta’s data centers used more than 18,000 gigawatt hours of electricity. That’s nearly enough to power more than 1.7 million U.S. homes for a year, and the need for computing power will only increase. The company is working to build 30 gigawatts of renewable power, primarily industrial-scale solar power plants.

Data centers that go solar typically need to invest in battery storage or rely on other sources of power generation to operate at night.

Overview, a four-year-old Ashburn, Va., company that emerged from stealth in December, has a different solution. The company is developing a spacecraft that can collect abundant solar energy in space. The plan is then to convert that energy into near-infrared light and beam it into a solar power generation facility large enough, on the order of a few hundred megawatts, to convert the light into electricity.

By using broad infrared beams to power existing terrestrial solar infrastructure, Overview believes it can avoid the technical challenges, safety and regulatory issues that the Devil plans to transmit power to Earth via high-power lasers or microwave beams. CEO Marc Berte says it will be possible to look directly into the satellite’s beam without any negative effects.

Deploying this technology at scale would improve the return on investment from building solar power facilities and reduce dependence on fossil fuels.

According to the outline, the company has already demonstrated power transmission from an aircraft to the ground, and plans to launch a satellite into low Earth orbit in January 2028 to perform the first power transmission from space.

In today’s announcement, Meta said it had signed an initial capacity reservation agreement with Overview to receive up to 1 gigawatt of power from its spacecraft, but it is unclear whether any money was exchanged. Overview has developed a new metric for this contract: megawatt photons. This is the amount of light required to generate megawatts of power.

Berthe plans to begin launching satellites to deliver on that promise in 2030, with a goal of flying 1,000 spacecraft in geostationary orbit (a high orbit in which each satellite is fixed over the same point on Earth). He expects each of the company’s spacecraft to be powered from space for more than 10 years.

Once in space, the fleet will be able to cover about a third of the Earth, Berthe said, with initial deployments expected to span from the U.S. West Coast to western Europe. As the Earth rotates below and the customer’s solar power plant turns evening into night, the Overview spacecraft needs to add light from space to increase power generation.

Berte sees an opportunity to combine both generation and transmission to gain the flexibility to power solar farms wherever and whenever they find the most value.

“There’s a big difference between participating in one energy market and participating in all energy markets,” Berte told TechCrunch.