The race to secure electricity for AI models has reached new heights: Meta has signed an agreement with the startup Overview Energy that could see a thousand satellites beam infrared light to solar farms that power data centers at night.
In 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 compute power is only increasing. The company has committed to building 30 gigawatts of renewable power sources, with a focus on industrial-scale solar power plants.
Typically, data centers turning to solar power must either invest in battery storage or rely on other generation sources to operate at night.
Overview, a four-year-old, Ashburn, Virginia, outfit that emerged from stealth in December, has a different solution: The company is developing spacecraft that collect plentiful solar power in space. It then plans to convert that energy to near-infrared light and beam it at sufficiently large solar farms—on the order of hundreds of megawatts—which can convert that light to electricity.
By using a wide, infrared beam to power existing terrestrial solar infrastructure, Overview thinks it can sidestep the technological challenges and safety and regulatory issues that bedevil plans to transmit power to Earth through high-power lasers or microwave beams. CEO Marc Berte says you’ll be able to stare right into his satellite’s beam with no ill effects.
The technology would increase the return on investment from building solar farms and reduce reliance on fossil fuels — if it can be deployed at scale.
Overview says it has already demonstrated power transmission to the ground from an aircraft, and is planning to launch a satellite to low Earth orbit in January 2028 to perform its first power transmission from space.
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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, although 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 a megawatt of electricity.
Berte expects to begin launching the satellites that would fulfill that commitment in 2030, with a goal of flying 1,000 spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit, a high orbit in which each satellite remains fixed above the same point on Earth. He expects each of the company’s spacecraft to 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 customer solar farms enter evening and night, Overview’s spacecraft should boost their electrical generation with additional light from space.
Berte sees opportunity in combining both generation and transmission, with the flexibility to deliver power to solar farms wherever and whenever it is most valuable.
“There’s a big difference between being in any one energy market, and being in all of the energy markets,” Berte told TechCrunch.
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