We recently reported that most people don’t want a data center near their neighborhood, but a couple of major players in housing and technology are hoping that consumers will be willing to put a mini data center on the walls of their homes.
California-based startup Span, which originally launched with “smart” electrical panels designed to help homeowners save money on their electricity bills, has come up with something new. With the help of tech giant Nvidia, it is offering small, fractional data centers, or “nodes,” called XFRA units, that can be put on the side of residential homes and small commercial businesses, CNBC reported.
The Span systems are going on newly built homes.
PulteGroup, one of the nation’s largest homebuilders, is in the early testing phase as it assesses economics and capabilities of the XFRA nodes, according to a company spokesperson. Already, PulteGroup has deployed some of the units in a handful of communities.
“There is certainly opportunity, as SPAN can provide homeowners with access to innovative technology and potential income generation that can help offset monthly energy costs,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “On a larger scale, if the technology proves out, it might also keep local infrastructure from being overburdened which could keep land open for other uses, such as building homes.”
Unused Electrical Capacity
The idea is to take advantage of unused electrical capacity on local grids, CNBC noted, which the Span smart panels can pinpoint. AI’s rapid growth has strained power grids nationwide and, in some cases, resulted in higher electricity bills for homeowners, CNBC said.
A network of nodes communicating with each other across the nation is the equivalent of a small- to mid-sized traditional data center, which could either augment an existing center or negate the need to build a new one, Span said.
Hyperscalers and AI cloud providers just tap into the network as they would a traditional data center, CNBC noted.
“Fundamentally, it’s an infrastructure play,” said Arch Rao, founder and CEO of Span. “We’re uniquely positioned to build infrastructure that can simultaneously help us meet what is clearly an insatiable demand for more compute, much more cost effectively, while benefiting individual consumers.”
CNBC said the small, white XFRA boxes with the hardware inside are put on the outside of homes, alongside regular HVAC and electrical systems. Span said it can install 8,000 XFRA units about six times faster and at five times lower cost than the construction of a typical centralized 100 megawatt data center of the same size, CNBC noted.
Span uses Nvidia’s technology in the system, including one of the first-to-market uses of liquid-cooled Nvidia RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs, which require no fans, making them quiet.
“We’re trying to get access to power, and there’s a lot of power right now on the grid. But, unfortunately, to come up with large loads for big data centers — it’s a challenge,” said Marc Spieler, Senior Managing Director of Global Energy Industry at Nvidia. “The ability to leverage existing locations that have access to power makes a lot of sense. … We believe that we can bring on AI solutions quicker, and it should add to the affordability story.”
A Flat Fee
The Span systems include its smart electrical panel, the XFRA unit, a home backup battery and, in some cases, solar panels. The panels tap into existing, unused electrical capacity, which then powers the XFRA system. Homeowners would pay a flat fee for both electricity and Wi-Fi.
“If you are one of the homes that is hosting an XFRA node, XFRA will then give you compensation for energy and internet usage,” Rao said. “We expect that the value there is a heavily discounted cost of energy and internet.”
