The plan aims to speed up AI compute deployment while compensating residents.
Data centers may be coming to your neighborhood as side installations associated with new homes—and in exchange would offer subsidized electricity and Internet access along with backup batteries to homeowners. The company behind the plan has already begun pilot testing in preparation for a 100-home trial run this year.
The “distributed data center solution” announced by the San Francisco startup SPAN would deploy thousands of XFRA nodes that contain liquid-cooled Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs operating with minimal noise, according to a press release. By harnessing excess power capacity among US households, SPAN aims to quickly expand the available compute for AI workloads without the costs and delays associated with trying to build warehouse-sized data centers.
“Data centers are loud, ugly, and often drive up local electricity bills,” said Chris Lander, vice president of XFRA at SPAN, in correspondence with Ars. “[This] is quiet, discreet, and makes energy more affordable for the host and community.”
SPAN’s approach could avoid the significant land use and water consumption issues that come with huge data center projects, which may help sidestep growing community opposition to such developments. In a CNBC interview, SPAN also claimed it could install 8,000 XFRA units at a cost five times lower than building a typical 100-megawatt data center with the same compute capacity.
...read more at arstechnica.com
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I find myself wondering if nowadays, to get funded for your AI-adjacent "idea", you need to get some press first?
Another example: last night, @Car's share (#1489097) lead me to read, on that same site, a piece about solving "the open terminal dependency" for CLI coding. Like breh... that was solved 20 seconds after Claude Code was released. But apparently this is news. ~lol
Some media coverage definitely helps. FYI: Ars Technica doesn’t take sponsored content!
Oh I'm not accusing them of sponsoring content; I am confident that these journos are of the opinion that these are fantastic ideas/plans that need to be reported on. I don't truly understand why they think that, but that's probably just me not being a journo.
What I wonder about is what is driving these people to publish pre-execution, with only theoretical moats, which in turn leads me to think: is the article the moat?
Oh that's cute. Shift the cost of electricity to residential homeowners duped into thinking they will make a profit running a decentralized AI network. Let's see how long that lasts after the first electricity bill comes due...
This is a good idea in theory but will probably play out like residential solar panels...with contracts that leave the residence owner with all the downside if the demand subsides or some other preferred way for amassing compute comes about.
Devil will be in the details.