Star Power: Meta Inks Wild Deal to Beam Solar Energy from Space
The race to fuel the AI revolution just reached the stars. Meta recently signed a massive agreement with a startup called Overview Energy that could change how we power the planet. This deal involves a fleet of a thousand satellites designed to beam infrared light down to solar farms on Earth. This technology aims to solve the biggest problem with solar power: it usually stops working when the sun goes down. By using space-based beams, Meta wants to keep its data centers running on clean energy all night long.
Meta’s hunger for electricity is staggering. In 2024, their data centers used more than 18,000 gigawatt-hours of power. That is enough to light up 1.7 million American homes for an entire year. As AI models get bigger and smarter, that need for juice is only going up. The company has already committed to building 30 gigawatts of renewable power sources on the ground. But ground-based solar has limits. Usually, companies have to buy expensive batteries to store power for the night. Overview Energy offers a way to skip the batteries and get power directly from the sky.
How Space Beams Work
Overview Energy is a four-year-old company from Virginia that just stepped out of the shadows. Their plan is to put satellites into a high orbit where the sun always shines. These satellites will collect solar energy and convert it into near-infrared light. They then beam that light down to existing solar farms on the ground. The beams can provide hundreds of megawatts of energy, which the solar panels then turn back into electricity.
The company says this infrared light is safe. You can look directly at the satellite beam with your naked eyes and feel no ill effects. Because the beam targets existing solar infrastructure, it doesn’t require building massive new power plants. It just makes the ones we already have much more efficient. Overview has already tested this tech by sending power from an aircraft to the ground. They plan to launch their first satellite into low Earth orbit in January 2028.
A Fleet of Sun-Catchers
Under this new deal, Meta is reserving the first gigawatt of power from Overview’s spacecraft. While we don’t know if any money changed hands yet, the commitment is a huge vote of confidence. Overview developed a new metric for this contract called “megawatt photons.” This measures exactly how much light is needed to generate a megawatt of electricity on the ground.
CEO Marc Berte expects to start launching the full fleet by 2030. These will be large, 1,000-pound satellites placed in geosynchronous orbit. This means they stay fixed above the same point on Earth at all times. Once the full fleet is up, Berte says they can cover about a third of the planet. The initial rollout will focus on the West Coast of the United States and move across to Western Europe. As the world rotates and solar farms enter the dark of night, Overview’s satellites will kick in to provide extra light from space.
This deal shows a massive shift in how big tech thinks about energy. They aren’t just buying power from the grid anymore. They are investing in the hardware to create it in orbit. If this works, it could drastically reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. Berte believes that combining space-based generation with ground-based farms provides the flexibility needed to power a high-tech world. There is a big difference between being in one energy market and being in all of them at once. Meta is betting that the future of AI isn’t just on the ground, it is powered from above.
