Meta Signs Deal for Space-Beamed Solar Power and 100-Hour Batteries to Run AI Data Centers
Meta inked agreements with Overview Energy for up to 1 GW of orbital solar capacity and with Noon Energy for up to 1 GW / 100 GWh of ultra-long-duration storage, betting on exotic energy sources to keep its AI data centers humming.
Meta on April 27, 2026, announced two of the most unusual energy deals in the AI era: a capacity reservation with startup Overview Energy for up to 1 gigawatt of solar power collected in orbit and beamed back to Earth, and a partnership with Noon Energy for up to 1 GW / 100 GWh of ultra-long-duration battery storage. Both agreements are designed to feed Meta’s rapidly growing fleet of AI data centers, which are straining U.S. grids and pushing hyperscalers to bet on technologies that did not exist a few years ago.
Overview Energy plans to put a constellation of roughly 1,000 satellites in geosynchronous orbit, each engineered to operate for more than 10 years. The spacecraft will collect sunlight, convert it into low-intensity near-infrared light, and beam that light down to large existing solar farms — on the order of hundreds of megawatts — which can convert it into electricity even when the sun has set. The startup has coined a new metric, “megawatt photons,” to describe the amount of beamed light required to generate one megawatt of electricity. Overview is targeting a first orbital demonstration in January 2028 and aims to begin satellite launches in 2030 to fulfill the Meta commitment, with initial coverage stretching from the U.S. West Coast across to Western Europe.
The Noon Energy partnership tackles the other half of the AI energy problem: storing power for hours or days, not just minutes. Meta has reserved up to 1 GW of capacity and 100 GWh of energy from Noon’s ultra-long-duration battery system, which the company says can deliver more than 100 hours of continuous discharge — far beyond what lithium-ion batteries are designed to do. An initial 25 MW / 2.5 GWh pilot is expected to come online in 2028, and Meta describes the deal as one of the largest commitments to ultra-long-duration storage announced by any single company.
Behind the headline-grabbing technology is a brutally practical math problem. Meta’s data centers consumed more than 18,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity in 2024 — roughly equivalent to powering 1.7 million American homes for a year — and the company has committed to building 30 gigawatts of renewable capacity to keep up with AI workloads. As Overview CEO Marc Berte put it, “there’s a big difference between being in any one energy market, and being in all of the energy markets.” By stacking space-based solar with multi-day storage, Meta is hedging against grid bottlenecks, intermittency, and rising power costs all at once — and signaling that frontier AI now has to be planned alongside frontier energy.
