Technological companies can express their love of advanced nuclear energy – the flashy trend that sweeps the energy sector – but they continue to add renewable capacities.
Meta recently signed an agreement with the Spanish renewable developer Zelestra for 595 solar energy megawatts in Texas, just two weeks after having signed a separate solar agreement with the public services company Engie. This is an important purchase for the technological company, which represents a bump of almost 5% to the more than 12 gigawatts of renewable capacity that it currently has under contract.
The announcement comes while the meta -PDG Mark Zuckerberg maintains the ambitious strategy of the company’s AI – which will require heavy capital investments in data centers.
Meta is under racing to make her open-source model Llama 4 a rival of closed source competitors like Openai and Anthropic. And while Deepseek has shown that models could be developed more effectively, its approach does not necessarily apply to advanced models like Llama 4.
Meta plans to spend 60 billion dollars this year in capital investments, most of which would go to the infrastructure of the data center, calling it “strategic advantage” for the company, said Zuckerberg during a call for results Wednesday.
Like many of her peers, Meta bets that nuclear reactors can provide stable power for her future calculation needs, soliciting proposals of 1 to 4 gigawatts capacity to put online in the early 2030s. A gigawatt is enough to feed approximately 750,000 houses.
But the company cannot wait until then to add to its data center footprint. Meta and others deploy huge sums of capital to build data centers, which require significant amounts of power. The stewing point has experts predicting that half of all the new AI data centers will be undernourished by 2027.
Nuclear power plants take years to build and the last harvest of advanced reactors has not yet been commercially proven. The natural gas power plants are slightly faster.
Neither can compete with the speed of renewable deployment.
A solar farm can be put online in as little as 18 months, and because the technology is modular, parts of the power station can start to provide energy before the last panel is connected.
This speed allowed renewable energies such as wind, solar and grid battery wind to continue to accumulate new contracts with technological companies. In addition to this week’s agreement, Meta announced earlier this month that she had bought 200 solar megawatts in Engie, which will be published online later this year. Elsewhere, Microsoft helps deploy a value of $ 9 billion in renewals with Acadia Infrastructure Capital, while Google anchors a renewable fund of $ 20 billion with an intersect power and an increase in TPG.
