Tech Companies Invest in Renewable Energy Despite Nuclear Power Ambitions

Renowned tech companies, including Meta, continue to invest in renewable energy sources, despite their vocal support for advanced nuclear power. The companies are adding significant amounts of renewable capacity to their portfolios, with Meta recently signing deals for 595 megawatts of solar power in Texas and 200 megawatts of solar power from Engie.

Meta’s Renewable Energy Investments

The announcements come as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg maintains the company’s ambitious AI strategy, which requires substantial capital investments in data centers. Meta plans to spend $60 billion this year on capital investments, with most of it going towards data center infrastructure, which Zuckerberg calls a "strategic advantage" for the company.

Racing to Develop AI Models

Meta is racing to make its open-source Llama 4 model a rival to closed-source competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic. However, the company’s approach to developing leading-edge models like Llama 4 may not be as efficient as the DeepSeek approach, which showed that models can be developed more efficiently.

Nuclear Power and Data Center Infrastructure

Like many of its peers, Meta is betting that nuclear reactors can provide stable power for its future compute needs, soliciting proposals for 1 to 4 gigawatts of capacity to come online in the early 2030s. However, the company cannot wait until then to add to its data center footprint. Meta and others are deploying enormous sums of capital to build data centers, which need correspondingly large amounts of power.

Challenges with Nuclear Power

Nuclear power plants take years to build, and the latest crop of advanced reactors have yet to be commercially proven. Natural gas power plants are slightly faster, but they still cannot compete with the speed of renewable deployment. A solar farm can be brought online in as few as 18 months, and because the technology is modular, portions of the power plant can start delivering power before the last panel is connected.

Renewable Energy Deployment

The speed of renewable deployment has allowed renewables like wind, solar, and grid-scale battery storage to continue racking up new contracts from tech companies. In addition to this week’s deal, Meta announced earlier this month it bought 200 megawatts of solar from Engie, which will come online later this year. Elsewhere, Microsoft is helping to deploy $9 billion worth of renewables with Acadia Infrastructure Capital, while Google is anchoring a $20 billion renewable fund with Intersect Power and TPG Rise.

Conclusion

Despite their nuclear power ambitions, tech companies are continuing to invest in renewable energy sources. The speed of renewable deployment has allowed companies like Meta to add significant amounts of renewable capacity to their portfolios, while also investing in data center infrastructure to support their AI strategies.