Meta makes a big bet on space-based power generation! Secures Overview Energy's future capacity to "feed" AI data centers

According to Zhitong Finance APP, Meta Platforms (META.US) is seeking to utilize solar energy collected in space to power its artificial intelligence (AI) data centers, in a novel way to meet its nearly endless power demands. Meta announced on Monday that it has reached an agreement with the startup Overview Energy to obtain up to 1 gigawatt of solar power from space. One gigawatt of power is roughly equivalent to the output capacity of a nuclear reactor.

Meta declined to disclose the financial terms of the agreement. Under the agreement, Meta will have priority access to Overview Energy's future power generation capacity. Both parties stated that they expect to achieve commercial power supply by 2030. Nat Sahlstrom, Meta's Vice President of Energy and Sustainability, stated in a press release that the company hopes Overview Energy can provide it with clean and "uninterrupted energy."

Overview Energy plans to collect sunlight through satellites orbiting the Earth and convert it into electricity to support grid operations. The company's envisioned space power station—transmitting energy back to Earth—is still in the theoretical stage. The startup is continuing to develop and test its underlying technology and plans to conduct its first orbital demonstration in 2028.

Overview Energy is betting on the idea that "the sun never sets in space." If its efforts to continuously collect energy and transmit it back to Earth receiving stations are successful, it will provide a clean energy solution that avoids some limitations of ground-based solar panels, as ground solar power generation efficiency is often affected by weather, day-night cycles, and seasonal changes.

For Meta, this initiative is part of its massive AI investment spree. The company is investing hundreds of billions of dollars to ensure the energy, infrastructure, and computing power needed to support its AI plans. Meta's AI ambitions have largely relied on natural gas so far, as the company believes natural gas is more stable and reliable compared to some cleaner energy forms. Meta is currently building its largest AI data center campus in rural Louisiana, supporting the development of ten new gas power plants for the campus.

With the exponential growth in AI's demand for computing power in recent years, the "three highs" pain points of ground computing centers have become an industry consensus: large data centers consume as much electricity as a medium-sized city, cooling costs account for 30% of total operating expenses, and coverage blind spots in remote areas, oceans, and airspace are particularly difficult to overcome. The space environment provides a natural solution—solar energy utilization efficiency is over 30% higher than on the ground due to the lack of atmospheric obstruction, vacuum conditions achieve zero-cost cooling, and low-orbit satellite networks can achieve millisecond-level global coverage. However, the current high costs of satellite launch and construction have yet to yield any practical projects.

It is worth mentioning that Meta is not the only company attempting to meet data center energy demands through space. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and others have previously discussed deploying computing facilities in orbit Elon Musk previously announced plans to invest in the chip project TeaFab, which aims to achieve an annual production capacity of 1 terawatt (TW) of AI computing power, with production scheduled for 2027. Of this, 80% of the chips will be used for space computing centers. Earlier this year, Musk's commercial space giant SpaceX submitted an application to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to deploy up to 1 million satellites, intending to build the world's first "orbital data center network" to provide AI models with space computing power.

Additionally, it has been reported that Jeff Bezos's space exploration company Blue Origin officially announced its entry into the space AI infrastructure sector last month. Reports indicate that Blue Origin submitted official application documents to the FCC on March 19, seeking regulatory approval for its massive satellite network deployment plan, which aims to deploy nearly 52,000 highly specialized satellites in Earth's orbit. Unlike traditional communication or navigation satellites, this large group of satellites is specifically designed to handle complex artificial intelligence computing tasks and will be equipped with advanced processing chips to perform high-intensity AI data computations directly in space