Renewable energy startup, Span, has partnered with Nvidia to launch XFRA, a distributed data center system that mounts compute nodes on the exterior walls of homes and small businesses. Each box uses Nvidia’s liquid-cooled RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPUs and taps unused capacity on local grids. Span claims it can deploy 8,000 units six times faster and at one-fifth the cost of a comparable 100-megawatt centralized facility. Homeowners receive a smart electrical panel, battery backup, and discounted utilities. The company is currently testing the system with homebuilder PulteGroup. The approach targets surging AI inference demand as traditional data centers face multi-year grid delays.
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Just wait until thieves catch on the the value of the gpus inside there and see what happens next
So leave a 100k computer outside 😂😂😂😂 and you think people steal copper, catalytic converters lol 😂😂😂😂😂
Seems like they’d be exposed to theft
Liquid-cooled Blackwell on exterior walls. In Phoenix. In August. Thermal cycling alone makes this a fundamentally different problem. The 1/5 cost claim ignores maintenance at residential scale.
Latency is gonna be the bottle neck
at least we get a way to get ram now.
Hell I would steal it from my own house and game on it, and report it stolen lmao
Very well thought plan… 1- leaving $100k + equipment outside in this economy. 2- most areas reach about 90+ in summer and below 30 in winter in usa ( great thermal range for maximum operation) 3- who is paying the electricity bill?
This seems like a pretty great idea actually in the scenario of AI going rogue
People in those neighborhoods wont be angry at the data centers for driving up the electricity bill in the area. They will be angry at each other.
Next: NVIDIA dryer.
The same happened back in days of new televisions. Pay people to Put it in their homes and give em other benefits or the entire unit after the project is done. In this case, itll could also turn into a smart home after you're done because they'll give you new tech to try along with it during the process
So they're putting loot boxes on every home??! 😂
San Francisco and LA can’t wait for these to be installed.. 😂
Would be worried about theft of the GPUs and potential damage from natural disasters. Sounds like a good idea until you factor in the headaches and a minor subsidy on the electric bill. Now if the company using the box is willing to pay rent to host this on a private property, that would be attractive on top of the subsidy for electricity.
Oh, that sounds expensive... ill be righhhht back
Thought having having your catalytic converter stolen off of your car was annoying? Wait till they find out how much RTX PRO 6000s go for... LOL
Okay for a normal us resident. I’ll put it in simple words. Just like how when you use the mobile monitoring on your car insurance app which they say rewards safe drivers and studies your habits and then jack up the prices. This is something like this.
There is a german startup doing the same called INGE
Unless your paying for my mortgage, no thanks