The scale of what AI infrastructure demands is forcing companies into territory that would have seemed like science fiction a decade ago. Meta announced this week two new energy partnerships: one to receive solar power harvested in geosynchronous orbit and beamed down to Earth, and another to store clean energy for over 100 hours at a stretch. Neither technology exists yet at commercial scale. That is what makes the announcement worth paying attention to.
The first partnership is with Overview Energy, a company founded in 2022 that is building satellite infrastructure to capture solar power continuously in orbit, then transmit it to Earth as low-intensity near-infrared light. Receivers at existing solar farms would convert that beam into electricity around the clock, even at night. Meta has reserved up to 1 gigawatt of this capacity, with an orbital demonstration planned for 2028 and commercial delivery targeted for 2030. It would be among the first large-scale commercial applications of space-based solar power.
The second partnership is with Noon Energy, whose technology uses modular solid oxide fuel cells and carbon-based storage to hold renewable energy for more than 100 hours. Standard lithium-ion batteries top out at around four to eight hours. Meta has reserved 1 GW with 100 GWh of this capacity, with a 25 MW pilot also expected by 2028. The company describes it as one of the largest commitments to ultra-long-duration storage in the industry.
Both moves are responses to the same underlying problem. AI data centers need vast quantities of reliable, always-on electricity. Solar panels produce electricity only when the sun is shining. Wind turbines depend on the weather. Grid-scale battery storage, as it currently exists, smooths out intermittency measured in hours, not days. The consequence, visible in energy data across the US, UK, China, and Australia, is that major tech companies are falling back on natural gas to fill the gaps, extending coal plant retirements, and driving up carbon emissions at the same time as they publicly announce clean energy commitments.
Meta has already contracted more than 30 gigawatts of clean and renewable energy, including agreements with nuclear operators Vistra, TerraPower, Oklo, and Constellation Energy. The Overview and Noon partnerships extend that portfolio into technologies that do not yet have a proven commercial track record but could, if they work, eliminate the core intermittency problem that makes clean energy difficult to rely on at scale.
There are significant uncertainties. Space-based solar has never been deployed commercially. Transmitting energy wirelessly across 22,000 miles involves regulatory questions, technical challenges, and economic variables that remain unresolved. Ultra-long-duration storage faces cost and durability hurdles that have limited its adoption. Both technologies are likely to be expensive at first. Meta is, in effect, betting that locking in early access rights now is worth the risk that neither works out on schedule.
That calculation may prove sound. The clean alternatives that exist today are structurally insufficient for always-on computing loads. As one senior energy consultant told Business Insider this week, natural gas has become the marginal fuel: the one that fills the gap when everything else runs short. Investing now in technologies that bypass that constraint is, at minimum, a credible hedge. At best, it produces the infrastructure that lets AI scale without making the climate problem significantly worse. The question is whether 2028 orbital demonstrations can move fast enough to matter against a buildout that is happening right now.