-Facebook’s parent company Meta Platforms said on Monday it has signed a deal to buy geothermal power from Sage Geosystems to power its U.S. data centers as the company races to build infrastructure to support its huge investments in energy-intensive artificial intelligence.
The social media company said the first phase of the 150-megawatt project will be operational by 2027 and “significantly” expand the use of geothermal power in the US. The site has yet to be determined, but will be east of the Rocky Mountains.
Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
Geothermal power is a renewable energy source that uses the Earth’s internal heat to produce electricity and heat water. 150 megawatts is enough power to power roughly 38,000 homes.
Meta’s announcement came as part of a Department of Energy event on geothermal development as President Joe Biden’s administration calls on big tech companies to invest in new clean generation to meet surging electricity demand.
The surge is being driven by the adoption of technologies such as generative AI, which provides huge amounts of power to data centers, and could complicate Biden’s goal of decarbonizing the power sector by 2035 to fight climate change.
Houston-based Sage is a four-year-old startup developing a next-generation technology that it says can be deployed in more places than traditional geothermal power, which requires natural underground reservoirs and accounts for 0.4 percent of U.S. electricity.
The company is backed by oil and gas companies Chesapeake Energy and Neighbors Industries, and venture capital firms Viria and Helium 3 Ventures.
The Meta project will be Sage’s largest to date, as the company says it first tested the technology in the field just two years ago.
A Meta spokesman told Reuters the company envisages feeding Sage Geosystems’ energy into the power grid rather than directly into specific data centers.
Meta has been overhauling and building out its infrastructure over the past few years to support its generative AI efforts, retrofitting its data centers to support the best types of chips for AI workloads.
The AI push has caused the company’s expenses to soar: Last month, Meta predicted capital expenditures of $37 billion to $40 billion in 2024, and warned that infrastructure costs would remain a “significant driver” of expense growth in 2025.
(Reporting by Katie Paul and Nicola Groom in New York; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
