Meta Seeks To Power Data Centers With Energy Beamed From Space

Meta Platforms Inc. is looking to powerfulness artificial intelligence information centers pinch star power collected successful space, taking a caller attack to gathering its insatiable request for electricity.

The institution said Monday that it clinched a woody for up to 1 gigawatt of abstraction star power from Overview Energy, a startup seeking to cod sunlight successful satellites orbiting Earth and person it into energy to support nan grid. A gigawatt is astir balanced to nan powerfulness generated by a atomic reactor.

Overview Energy’s imagination for a space-based powerfulness works that beams power backmost to Earth is still hypothetical. The startup is continuing to create and trial its underlying technology, pinch plans to behaviour an first orbital objection successful 2028.

Meta declined to remark connected nan financial position of nan agreement, which would supply preferential entree to Overview Energy’s early capacity. The companies said they expect commercialized powerfulness transportation successful 2030.

Meta isn’t nan only 1 looking to abstraction to meet its information halfway needs. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and others person discussed putting nan computing accommodation themselves successful orbit.

For Meta, nan move is portion of a monolithic AI spending spree. The institution is allocating hundreds of billions of dollars to unafraid nan energy, infrastructure and computing capacity needed to support its artificial intelligence plans.

It hopes that Overview Energy will connection it entree to clean, “uninterrupted energy,” Nat Sahlstrom, Meta’s vice president of power and sustainability, said successful a statement.

Meta’s AI ambitions person relied heavy connected earthy gas, which it has viewed arsenic a much accordant and reliable shape of power than immoderate cleaner sources.

The institution is supporting nan improvement of 10 caller gas-fired plants for its biggest AI information halfway campus, which it is presently building successful agrarian Louisiana.

Overview Energy, based successful bluish Virginia, is capitalizing connected nan thought that nan sun ne'er sets successful space.

If its efforts to cod continuous power and beam it backmost to receivers connected Earth are successful, it could supply a cleanable power solution that avoids immoderate of nan limitations of terrestrial star panels. Their capacity varies based connected weather, clip of time and nan season.

Griffin writes for Bloomberg.