12 Stocks to Buy After Meta’s Deal to Beam Energy From Space
Listen to the audio version of this article (generated by AI). Most investors think the AI infrastructure arms race is about chips. And chips matter enormously—Nvidia’s (NVDA) Blackwell GPUs, Broadcom’s (AVGO) custom AI accelerators, Marvell’s (MRVL) networking silicon. These are real, important, and worth owning. But the constraint that is becoming the ceiling on AI buildout isn’t silicon—it’s watts. A single next-generation AI training cluster (the kind that trains frontier models like GPT-5 or Claude 4) can consume 1 to 2 gigawatts of electricity. That is enough power to run a mid-sized American city. The hyperscalers—Meta (META), Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOGL), Amazon (AMZN)—are each trying to build dozens of these clusters simultaneously around the globe. The U.S. electrical grid was not designed for this. Utility interconnection queues—waiting lists to plug new facilities into the grid—now stretch 5 to 10 years in many regions. Environmental permitting adds more time. Transmission infrastructure is decades behind where it needs to be. And the laws of physics don’t care how much money you have: you cannot run a 2-gigawatt data center if there are only 500 megawatts available on the local grid. This is what we call the resource-bound problem. And the companies that figure out how to route around this constraint will win the AI infrastructure race. Meta just showed you one of the most audacious routes imaginable. The company struck a commercial agreement with a startup called Overview Energy to power its artificial intelligence data centers using solar energy collected in space and beamed back to Earth. Overview plans an initial orbital demonstration in 2028, with commercial power delivery beginning in 2030. This is no simple corporate press release—it’s a commercial deal with a delivery schedule signed by Meta, which is spending $60 billion to $65 billion on AI capital expenditure in 2025 alone. Meta does not sign orbital energy contracts for fun. The company’s engineers ran the numbers, looked at the global power grid, and concluded that Earth cannot supply enough electricity to support their AI ambitions. That is an extraordinary admission. One company isn’t waiting for Washington to fix the grid or hoping some utility builds a new transmission line in time. It went over all of it—literally. Meta’s Overview Energy deal validates Phase One of the Orbital Compute thesis: orbital power generation beamed back to terrestrial data centers. Phase Two—actual compute infrastructure in orbit—is the logical next step once the orbital energy and launch infrastructure matures. The core insight behind Orbital Compute is that terrestrial infrastructure is resource-bound, while orbital infrastructure is technology-bound. Resource-bound systems hit ceilings that don’t scale with innovation, but technology-bound systems—where cost and capability improve over time—fall in price and performance like semiconductors. Space infrastructure is technology-bound. Launch costs have fallen approximately 90% over the past decade, almost entirely due to SpaceX’s reusable rockets. Starship, SpaceX’s next-generation launch vehicle, promises to drop costs another order of magnitude. As launch becomes cheaper and more reliable, putting infrastructure in orbit stops being a moonshot and starts being a business decision. Space is a remarkable place to generate power: solar panels in orbit face the sun 24 hours a day with no clouds, no night, no weather, producing roughly 8 to 10 times more electricity per panel than on Earth. Cooling is easier too: heat radiates into the cold of space, no giant air conditioning units required. For heavy-duty AI jobs that don’t need to happen in real time—training a model, crunching massive datasets—it doesn’t matter where the computer physically sits. Why not run those jobs in orbit, where the power is essentially free and unlimited? Meta’s Overview Energy deal confirms this thesis: orbital power generation beamed back to terrestrial data centers. The 5 Orbital Pure-Play Stocks to Buy: NASA ETF (NASA) is the most direct way to own SpaceX in the public markets. The NASA ETF holds a basket of space-economy companies with meaningful SpaceX exposure. SpaceX dominates launch, develops Starship to push costs lower, and operates Starlink, the world’s most commercially successful satellite constellation. The NASA ETF is the cleanest public-market proxy for SpaceX’s monopoly in orbital access. Rocket Lab (RKLB) is a credible second player in the launch market, offering reliable and affordable small-payload launches with Electron and expanding Neutron rocket development. As orbital infrastructure demand scales, Rocket Lab is positioned to capture a share of the second-tier launch market and build a recurring revenue base in satellite manufacturing. Planet Labs (PL) operates the world’s largest constellation of Earth-observation satellites, capturing daily imagery of the entire planet’s landmass. This enables real-time monitoring of supply chains, agricultural yields, infrastructure construction, military positioning, and environmental change at a scale no terrestrial system can match. As AI models improve, Planet’s data becomes more valuable. AST SpaceMobile (ASTS) is building a constellation of large, phased-array satellites to deliver broadband connectivity directly to mobile phones, with early satellites already operational. Redwire Space (RDW) manufactures specialized hardware for space environments, becoming critical suppliers as orbital infrastructure scales. The Orbital Compute thesis doesn’t replace terrestrial AI infrastructure but extends it. The buildout happening on Earth—hundreds of billions in data center construction, chip fabrication, power infrastructure, and networking—is the bridge to the orbital era. While Overview Energy prepares for its 2028 orbital demo, hyperscalers are still building terrestrial infrastructure. Meta’s deal confirms the long-term direction, but near-term dollars flow into terrestrial AI infrastructure. The classic AI infrastructure basket remains relevant. Nvidia (NVDA) supplies the GPUs powering virtually every major AI training and inference workload. Broadcom (AVGO) designs custom AI accelerators (XPUs) for hyperscalers like Google, Meta, and ByteDance, with AI revenue growing explosively. Marvell Technology (MRVL) designs custom AI accelerators and high-speed networking chips for Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, with fiscal 2028 AI revenue targeting $15 billion. Eaton Corporation (ETN) supplies power management and distribution equipment for data centers, expanding as AI data centers grow. Coherent (COHR) and Lumentum (LITE) manufacture optical transceivers and components for high-speed data transmission in AI clusters. Astera Labs (ALAB) designs semiconductor connectivity solutions like CXL memory expansion and PCIe retimers, solving data bottlenecks in AI servers. The Bottom Line: Meta’s Overview Energy deal is a data point of extraordinary significance. It’s not speculative tech—it’s a company committing to orbital energy sourcing after investing $60 billion in AI infrastructure. When hyperscalers start sourcing electricity from orbit, old investment frameworks for AI infrastructure must expand. The orbital compute bull thesis rests on a simple, durable premise: Earth is running out of room to build AI, and companies solving this problem from orbit will be among the most important infrastructure investments of the next two decades. Meta just handed us the clearest confirmation signal yet that the thesis is correct and already being acted on at the highest levels of corporate capital allocation. The question is whether you’re positioned before the rest of the market notices. The companies solving this problem from orbit are still flying under most investors’ radar, but another infrastructure revolution is unfolding—one that could be just as transformative and underfollowed.
Source: InvestorPlace