Meta has signed a capacity reservation agreement with Overview Energy for up to 1 gigawatt of solar power beamed from space, the first commercial deal of its kind for an AI hyperscaler. The four-year-old Ashburn, Virginia startup plans to fly a fleet of spacecraft that collect sunlight in orbit, convert it to near-infrared light, and beam it down to terrestrial solar farms after dark. The arrangement targets one of the hardest constraints on AI compute growth: keeping data centers running on renewables when the sun is down.
Meta's data centers used more than 18,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity in 2024, roughly the annual consumption of 1.7 million American homes, and the company's compute demand keeps climbing. Meta has committed to building 30 gigawatts of renewable power, leaning heavily on industrial-scale solar. The Overview deal is a hedge against the storage problem that has dogged every solar-powered data center plan to date.
Overview emerged from stealth in December 2024 with a pitch that sidesteps the dominant approaches to space-based power. Rather than transmitting energy to Earth through high-power lasers or microwave beams — both of which carry safety, regulatory, and aiming headaches — Overview uses a wide infrared beam aimed at existing solar farms on the order of hundreds of megawatts. Those farms convert the incoming light to electricity using the same panels they already operate during the day.
Key facts
- 01Meta signed a capacity reservation agreement with Overview Energy for up to 1 gigawatt of power beamed from space.
- 02Meta's data centers consumed more than 18,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity in 2024, equivalent to 1.7 million US homes.
- 03Overview plans to launch its first power-transmission satellite to low Earth orbit in January 2028.
- 04The full constellation targets 1,000 spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit starting in 2030, each lasting 10+ years.
- 05Meta has committed to building 30 gigawatts of renewable power capacity to feed its AI buildout.
Marc Berte, Overview's CEO, said "you'll be able to stare right into his satellite's beam with no ill effects," framing the wide-beam infrared design as a regulatory advantage over competitors pursuing concentrated transmission. The model also raises the return on capital for terrestrial solar farms, which can keep generating revenue at night without battery banks.
“Meta's data centers used more than 18,000 gigawatt-hours in 2024, enough to power 1.7 million American homes for a year — and the appetite is still growing.”— Jaeden Schafer
The deployment timeline is long. Overview says it has already demonstrated power transmission to the ground from an aircraft, and plans its first satellite-to-ground power transmission from low Earth orbit in January 2028. Production launches for the Meta agreement begin in 2030, with a target of 1,000 spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit, each rated for more than 10 years of service.
Once built out, the constellation should cover about a third of the planet, with initial coverage stretching from the West Coast of the United States across Western Europe. As Earth rotates and customer solar farms move into evening, Overview's satellites add light from above to keep generation flowing. Berte argues the architecture lets the company sell into multiple energy markets at once rather than betting on any single grid.
"There's a big difference between being in any one energy market, and being in all of the energy markets," Berte told TechCrunch. Overview coined a new contract unit for the Meta deal — megawatt photons, the amount of light required to generate a megawatt of terrestrial electricity. It's an accounting fiction now, but a useful one if the model scales.
Neither side disclosed whether money has changed hands on the reservation, and capacity agreements of this kind are typically nonbinding until milestones hit. Meta has been aggressive about locking in power options as it competes with Microsoft, Google, and Amazon for the gigawatts needed to train and serve frontier models. The company is the same hyperscaler whose AI talent Thinking Machines has been poaching, a sign of how much pressure Meta is under to convert capital into capability.
The skeptic's case writes itself. Overview has not yet flown its first power-beaming satellite, the 1,000-spacecraft constellation requires launch cadence and unit economics that nobody has demonstrated for this payload class, and geosynchronous orbit is expensive real estate. A January 2028 in-space demo is the gating event; if it slips, the 2030 production timeline slips with it, and Meta's gigawatt of nighttime solar stays on PowerPoint.
Still, the deal tells you where the AI power conversation is heading. Hyperscalers have already exhausted the easy renewables, signed every nuclear PPA they can find, and started funding fusion startups. Reserving capacity from a pre-revenue space-solar company is the next rung on that ladder. If Overview hits its 2028 milestone, Meta gets a credible path to 24-hour solar-powered data centers; if it doesn't, Meta is out a signature on a non-cash agreement. That asymmetry is why this deal exists.
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