Solar Power Beamed From Space Could Help AI Companies Run on Clean Energy 24/7

What if the sun never had to set on renewable energy? That question is at the heart of one of the most ambitious clean energy proposals to emerge in recent years, and it could reshape how the world powers its most energy hungry technologies.

Artificial intelligence is consuming electricity at a breathtaking pace. Meta’s data centers alone used more than 18,000 gigawatt hours of electricity in 2024, enough to power over 1.7 million American homes for an entire year. And that demand is only climbing. The tech giant has pledged to build 30 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity, leaning heavily on large scale solar installations. The challenge, as anyone following clean energy knows, is that solar panels go dark when the sun goes down.

Battery storage is one solution, but it is expensive and difficult to scale. A startup called Overview Energy thinks there is a better way, one that involves launching a fleet of 1,000 satellites into geosynchronous orbit to collect solar power in space and beam it back to Earth as near infrared light. Existing ground based solar farms would then convert that light into usable electricity, keeping the power flowing day and night.

According to TechCrunch, Meta has already signed a capacity reservation agreement with Overview Energy for up to one gigawatt of power from the company’s spacecraft, marking a significant early vote of confidence in the technology. Overview has already demonstrated power transmission from an aircraft and plans to launch its first orbital test in January 2028, with a full commercial deployment beginning around 2030.

What makes this approach genuinely exciting from a sustainability standpoint is that it builds on infrastructure that already exists. Rather than requiring entirely new ground based systems, the technology would simply extend the productive hours of solar farms already in operation, reducing the economic and environmental cost of keeping data centers running without fossil fuels.

If Overview Energy can bring this vision to scale, it could represent a meaningful step toward a future where clean energy is truly available everywhere, all the time.

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