Tech corporations could also be vocal about their love of advanced nuclear power — the flashy trend that’s been sweeping the energy sector — but they proceed so as to add renewable capability.
Meta recently signed a take care of Spanish renewable developer Zelestra for 595 megawatts of solar energy in Texas, just two weeks after signing a separate solar take care of utility company Engie. It’s a major purchase for the tech company, representing an almost 5% bump to the 12-plus gigawatts of renewable capability it currently has under contract.
The announcement comes as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg maintains the corporate’s ambitious AI strategy — which is able to require hefty capital investments in data centers.
Meta is racing to make its open-source Llama 4 model a rival to closed-source competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic. And while DeepSeek showed that models may very well be developed more efficiently, its approach doesn’t necessarily apply to forefront models like Llama 4.
Meta plans to spend $60 billion this yr on capital investments, most of which might go toward data center infrastructure, calling it a “strategic advantage” for the corporate, Zuckerberg said during a Wednesday earnings call.
Like lots of its peers, Meta is betting that nuclear reactors can provide stable power for its future compute needs, soliciting proposals for 1 to 4 gigawatts of capability to return online within the early 2030s. One gigawatt is sufficient to power about 750,000 homes.
But the corporate can’t wait until then so as to add to its data center footprint. Meta and others are deploying enormous sums of capital to construct data centers, which need correspondingly large amounts of power. The chokepoint has some experts predicting that half of all recent AI data centers shall be underpowered by 2027.
Nuclear power plants take years to construct, and the most recent crop of advanced reactors have yet to be commercially proven. Natural gas power plants are barely faster.
Neither can compete with the speed of renewable deployment.
A solar farm will be brought online in as few as 18 months, and since the technology is modular, portions of the ability plant can start delivering power before the last panel is connected.
That speed has allowed renewables like wind, solar, and grid-scale battery storage to proceed racking up recent contracts from tech corporations. Along with this week’s deal, Meta announced earlier this month it bought 200 megawatts of solar from Engie, which is able to come online later this yr. Elsewhere, Microsoft helps to deploy $9 billion value of renewables with Acadia Infrastructure Capital, while Google is anchoring a $20 billion renewable fund with Intersect Power and TPG Rise.
