Meta recently signed a deal with the Spanish renewable energy company Zylstra to acquire 595 megawatts of solar power in Texas, just two weeks after signing a separate solar power deal with Engie.
This deal represents a significant purchase for the technology company, accounting for an increase of approximately 5% over the more than 12 gigawatts of renewable capacity it currently holds under contract.
This announcement comes as Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, continues to support the company's ambitious AI strategy, which will require massive capital investments in data centers.
Meta is racing to make the open-source Llama 4 model competitive against closed-source competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic.
Although "DeepSeek" has demonstrated the potential for more efficient model development, its methodology may not apply to advanced models such as Llama 4.
Zuckerberg said that Meta plans to spend $60 billion this year on capital investments, most of which will go toward data center infrastructure, describing it as the company's "strategic advantage."
Like many of its counterparts, Meta bets that nuclear reactors can provide stable energy for future computing needs. It requests proposals for reactors with capacities of 1 to 4 gigawatts that will be operational in the early 2030s.
One gigawatt is enough to power about 750,000 homes. But the company cannot wait until then to add more data centers.
Meta and other major tech companies invest enormous amounts of capital in building data centers, which require large amounts of energy.
Some experts expect that half of the new artificial intelligence data centers will be unable to operate by 2027.
Building nuclear power plants takes years, and the effectiveness of the latest advanced reactors has not yet been commercially proven, while natural gas power plants are a bit faster.
A solar farm can be operational in just 18 months, and because the technology is modular, parts of the power plant can start delivering energy before the last panel is connected.
This speed has allowed renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power, as well as grid-scale battery storage, to continue securing new contracts from technology companies.
On the other hand, Meta announced earlier this month that it had purchased 200 megawatts of solar power from Engie, which will come into service later this year.
Elsewhere, Microsoft is deploying $9 billion worth of renewable energy sources with Acadia Infrastructure Capital, while Google is establishing a $20 billion renewable energy fund with Intersect Power and TPG Rise.
