Epitaxial inks deal with solar energy at night, beamed in from space

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

In 2024, Meta’s data centers used more than 18,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity, nearly enough to power more than 18,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity. 1.7 million American homes For a year, its need for computing power has been increasing. The company has committed to building 30 gigawatts of renewable energy, with a focus on industrial-scale solar power plants.

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

Overview: A four-year-old, Ashburn, Virginia, wears this It emerged from the hidden In December, the company has a different solution: The company is developing spacecraft that collect abundant amounts of solar energy in space. It then plans to convert that energy into near-infrared light and send it to solar farms large enough — on the order of hundreds of megawatts — that can convert that light into electricity.

By using a broad infrared beam to power existing terrestrial solar infrastructure, Overview believes it can avoid the technological challenges, safety issues and regulatory issues that hamper plans to transmit power to Earth through high-powered lasers or microwave beams. CEO Mark Berti says you’ll be able to stare directly into its satellite beam with no ill effects.

This technology would increase the return on investment from building solar farms and reduce reliance on fossil fuels – if it could be deployed on a large scale.

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

In today’s announcement, Meta said it had signed its 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 has changed hands. Overview has developed a new metric for this decade: megawatt photons, which is the amount of light required to generate a megawatt of electricity.

Berti expects to begin launching satellites that will fulfill this commitment in 2030, with a goal of flying 1,000 spacecraft into geosynchronous orbit, a high orbit in which each satellite remains fixed above the same point on Earth. Each of the company’s spacecraft is expected to provide energy from space for more than 10 years.

Once in space, Berti says the spacecraft fleet will be able to cover about a third of the planet, with an initial deployment reaching from the West Coast of the United States through Western Europe. As the Earth rotates below and solar farms enter customers in the evening and night, the Overview spacecraft must boost its electrical generation with additional light from space.

Berti sees opportunity in combining both generation and transmission, with the flexibility to deliver power to solar farms where and when it is most valuable.

“There’s a big difference between being in any energy market and being in all energy markets,” Berti told TechCrunch.