The first phase of the 150-megawatt project should be operational by 2027 and “significantly” expand the use of geothermal power in the United States, the social media company said. The location has yet to be determined, but the companies said it will be east of the Rocky Mountains.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Geothermal power is a renewable energy source that uses the Earth’s internal heat to produce electricity and heat water. One-hundred and fifty megawatts is roughly enough electricity to power 38,000 homes.
Sage, which is based in Houston, is a four-year-old startup developing next-generation technology that it says can be deployed in more locations than traditional geothermal, which requires naturally occurring underground reservoirs of hot water and accounts for 0.4% of U.S. power generation.
The project for Meta would be Sage’s largest to date by far. The company said it first validated the technology in the field just two years ago.
A Meta spokesperson told Reuters the company expected the Sage Geosystems energy to feed the power grid, rather than directly supplying any specific data center.
Meta has been scrambling to overhaul and build out infrastructure to accommodate its push into generative AI for the last several years, refashioning its data centers to support the types of chips best suited to AI workloads.
That AI push has caused the company’s expenses to spike. Last month, Meta forecast 2024 capital expenditure would come in between $37 billion and $40 billion, while cautioning that infrastructure costs would continue to be a “significant driver” of expense growth in 2025.
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Reporting by Katie Paul in New York and Nichola Groom in New York
Editing by Matthew Lewis
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
