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. Overview Energy, 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,...
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