Meta Turns to Space-Based Solar Energy to Power AI Data Centers on Earth

Meta is looking to abstraction for much powerfulness arsenic artificial quality drives request for electricity.

In a post connected Monday, the Facebook and Instagram genitor institution announced that it signed an statement with Virginia-based startup Overview Energy to unafraid up to 1 gigawatt of energy from a planned space-based star powerfulness strategy for its information centers by the extremity of the decade.

Meta said its concern with Overview Energy is meant to make powerfulness successful abstraction and beam it to Earth, alternatively of attempting to enactment carnal data centers successful orbit arsenic antecedently suggested by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. The woody reflects increasing unit connected tech companies to find reliable powerfulness arsenic AI drives a surge successful electricity-hungry information centers and strains the U.S. grid.

“We’re ever looking astatine caller and innovative ways to supply reliable vigor to our information centers and adhd caller procreation to the grid,” a Meta spokesperson told Decrypt. “Space-based star is early-stage but it’s promising and it tin present continuous, carbon-free powerfulness and nonstop it wherever it’s needed successful existent time.”

The announcement comes days aft SpaceX warned successful a pre-IPO filing that orbital AI computing “may not execute commercialized viability,” contempt Musk publically calling space-based AI “a no-brainer.”

Overview Energy plans to cod changeless sunlight from geosynchronous orbit and beam it to star facilities connected Earth to make energy astir the clock, aft successfully demonstrating the halfway exertion past twelvemonth by transmitting powerfulness from a moving level to a crushed receiver.

“Our woody is structured astir milestones: We person preferential entree to up to 1GW of aboriginal capableness erstwhile those exertion milestones are met,” the spokesperson said.

Meta besides announced a woody with Noon Energy for much than 100 hours of vigor storage. The companies program an archetypal 25-megawatt, 2.5-gigawatt-hour aviator task successful 2028 earlier scaling toward the afloat 1 GW/100 GWh target.

Meta said it has backed much than 30 gigawatts of caller vigor crossed 28 states, including wind, solar, nuclear, and geothermal projects.

Space-based star has been proposed arsenic a mode to debar immoderate of the limitations of terrestrial solar, specified arsenic weather, atmospheric losses, and nighttime downtime. Still, the conception remains unproven astatine a commercialized scale, with questions astir motorboat costs, maintenance, and economics.

“This concern with Overview Energy is astir backing a exertion that could present reliable powerfulness from orbit and boost the output of star facilities connected Earth,” Meta’s spokesperson said. “We're giving it the task certainty it needs to develop.”