Meta turns to solar — again — in its data center-building boom

Technology companies can be vocal about their love for advanced nuclear power – the dazzling tendency is spreading the power sector – but they continue to add renewable power.

Meta recently signed an agreement with the Spanish renewable developer Gelstra for 595 MW solar power in Texas, just two weeks after signing a separate solar contract with the utility company engine. This is an important purchase for the Tech Company, it represents about 5% of the 12-Plus Gigawatt with a renewable capacity of the renewable capacity.

The announcement came as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had maintained the company’s ambitious AI strategy – which would require large capital investment at the data center.

The Meta Open-Source Lama is running the model to make the model OpenAI and ethnographic closed-source competitors competitive. And when DIPSEC has shown that models can be developed more efficiently, its approach is not necessarily applicable to the top edge models like Lama 4.

By plans to spend the meta This year is $ 60 billion Regarding capital investment, most of which will go to the data center infrastructure and call it “strategic benefits” for the organization, Zuckerberg said on Wednesday.

Like many of its colleagues, the meta is also betting that nuclear reactors can provide stable energy for its future calculation, requested proposals for 1 to 4 gigawatt capabilities to come online in the early 2030s. A gigwatt is enough for electricity to about 750,000 houses.

However, the company cannot wait to add to its data center footprints. Meta and others are setting up a lot of capital to create data centers, which requires a lot of energy properly. There are some experts in the Chokpoint that predicts that all new AI data centers will be half Under power Between 2027.

It takes years to build nuclear power plants and the latest crops of advanced reactors have not been commercially proven commercial. Natural gas power plants are a bit faster.

Both cannot compete with the speed of renewable deployment.

A solar farm can be brought online for about 18 months online and because the technology is a modular, the parts of the power plant can start supply before the last panel is connected.

This speed has allowed renewant to continue new agreements from the technology companies such as wind, solar and grid-scale battery storage. In addition to this week’s contract, Meta announced that it was purchased earlier this month Solar 200 MW From Angie, which will come online later this year. Somewhere else, Microsoft is helping Place $ 9 billion Acadia is a renewable price with infrastructure capital, while Google contains Anchoring A 20 billion dollar renewable fund with intersection power and TPG growth.