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Tech companies may be speaking up about their love for advanced nuclear power, a flashy trend that wipes out the energy sector, but they continue to add renewable capabilities.
Meta recently signed a deal with Spanish renewable developer Zelestra for 595 megawatts of solar power in Texas, and just two weeks after signing another solar deal with utility company Engie. This is a key purchase for high-tech companies, representing nearly 5% bumps to more than 12 gigawatts of renewable capacity currently under contract.
The announcement will require a significant capital investment in the data center as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg maintains the company’s ambitious AI strategy.
Meta is racing to make four open-source Lama models a rival to closed-source competitors such as Openai and Anthropic. Also, Deepseek has shown that models can be developed more efficiently, but that approach does not necessarily apply to cutting-edge models like the Llama 4.
Meta is expected to spend $60 billion on capital investments this year, most of which will be directed towards data center infrastructure, calling it a “strategic advantage” for the company, Zuckerberg said in a revenue call on Wednesday.
Like many of its peers, Meta is betting that nuclear reactors can provide stable power for future computational needs, and is seeking proposals for 1-4 gigawatt capabilities to get online in the early 2030s. One gigawatt is enough to run around 750,000 homes.
However, the company cannot wait until then for it to be added to the data center footprint. Meta and others have deployed enormous capital to support this and build data centers that require large amounts of electricity. Chokepoint has some experts who predict that half of all new AI data centers will be insufficient by 2027.
Nuclear power plants took years to build, and the latest crops in advanced nuclear reactors have yet to be commercially proven. Natural gas power plants are a little faster.
Neither can compete with the speed of renewable deployments.
Solar Farms can be brought online in just 18 months. Because the technology is modular, some of the power plants can start to power before the last panel is connected.
This speed has allowed renewable energies, such as wind, solar and grid-scale battery storage, to continue new contracts from high-tech companies. In addition to this week’s deal, Meta announced earlier this month that it had purchased 200 megawatts of solar from Engie. Elsewhere, Microsoft is helping Acadia Infrastructure Capital deploy $9 billion worth of renewable energy, while Google has locked it into a $20 billion renewable fund with cross-power and rising TPGs.