The competition to secure electricity for AI models has intensified: Meta has reached an agreement with the startup Overview Energy to utilize a thousand satellites to transmit infrared light to solar farms, powering data centers at night.
In 2024, Meta’s data centers consumed over 18,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity, enough to supply more than 1.7 million American homes for a year. The company’s demand for computing power continues to rise. Meta aims to establish 30 gigawatts of renewable energy sources, focusing on large-scale solar power plants.
Typically, data centers using solar power must invest in battery storage or depend on other energy sources at night.
Overview, a four-year-old company from Ashburn, Virginia, that emerged from stealth in December, offers a novel solution: spacecraft that gather ample solar power in space and convert it to near-infrared light, beaming it to large solar farms—hundreds of megawatts—which can then convert that light back to electricity.
By utilizing a wide, infrared beam to power existing ground-based solar infrastructure, Overview aims to overcome the technological and regulatory hurdles associated with transmitting power to Earth via high-power lasers or microwave beams. CEO Marc Berte asserts that looking directly into a satellite’s beam poses no risk.
This technology could boost the return on investment from solar farms and lessen dependence on fossil fuels if deployed on a large scale.
Overview claims to have already demonstrated power transmission from an aircraft and plans to launch a satellite to low Earth orbit in January 2028 for its first space-based power transmission.
In the recent announcement, Meta revealed a capacity reservation agreement with Overview for up to 1 gigawatt of power from the company’s spacecraft. Details on financial terms were not disclosed. Overview introduced a new metric, megawatt photons, representing the light amount needed to generate a megawatt of electricity.
Berte anticipates launching satellites to fulfill Meta’s commitment by 2030, aiming to deploy 1,000 spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit, where each satellite remains fixed above the same Earth point. He expects each spacecraft to supply space-based power for more than a decade.
Once operational, Berte claims the spacecraft fleet will cover about a third of the planet, initially spanning from the West Coast of the United States to Western Europe. As the Earth rotates and customer solar farms enter nighttime, Overview’s spacecraft should enhance their power generation with extra space-derived light.
Berte sees potential in combining energy generation and transmission, enabling power delivery to solar farms wherever and whenever needed most.
“There’s a big difference between being in any one energy market and being in all of the energy markets,” Berte stated to TechCrunch.