Meta signed a capacity reservation agreement with Overview Energy on 27 April, securing up to 1 gigawatt of power from a planned constellation of satellites that would beam near-infrared light to ground-based solar farms, allowing them to generate electricity after dark.

The deal arrives as AI compute demands push hyperscalers into increasingly ambitious energy procurement. Meta's data centres consumed more than 18,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity in 2024, and the company has committed to building 30 gigawatts of renewable capacity, with industrial-scale solar at the centre of that plan. The core problem with solar, of course, is that it stops working at night, forcing operators to either invest heavily in battery storage or fall back on grid power that may carry a carbon cost.

Overview Energy, a four-year-old firm based in Ashburn, Virginia, came out of stealth in December 2025 with a proposed solution. Rather than transmitting power via high-powered lasers or microwave beams, which carry significant safety and regulatory complications, the company intends to convert solar energy collected in space into wide, low-intensity near-infrared light and direct it at large terrestrial solar farms, on the order of hundreds of megawatts in capacity. Those farms can then convert the incoming light into electricity using their existing photovoltaic infrastructure. CEO Marc Berte has said the beam is safe enough to look at directly. The company says it has already demonstrated ground-level power transmission from an aircraft, and it plans to launch a satellite to low Earth orbit in January 2028 for its first in-space transmission test.

Under the terms announced, Meta has reserved capacity from Overview's planned fleet of roughly 1,000 spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit, with satellite launches expected to begin in 2030. The financial terms were not disclosed, and it is not clear whether any money changed hands at signing. Overview introduced a new unit for the contract, the megawatt photon, defined as the quantity of light needed to produce one megawatt of electricity on the ground. The company says each spacecraft should remain operational for more than a decade, and that an initial deployment would cover a corridor stretching from the west coast of the United States to western Europe, tracking the day-night boundary as the Earth rotates.

The agreement signals that at least some hyperscalers are willing to place long-dated bets on energy technologies that remain years from commercial operation. Whether space-based solar can reach cost parity with battery storage or grid alternatives is an open question, but the Meta contract gives Overview a named anchor customer as it pursues further financing and regulatory approvals.

Overview's next concrete milestone is the January 2028 orbital demonstration, which will be the first real test of whether the company's transmission approach performs as described outside a controlled atmospheric environment.