Major Homebuilder To Test Placing Mini Data Centers in Suburban Backyards (realtor.com) 120
NewtonsLaw writes: According to Realtor.com, a California startup called Span plans to partner with Nvidia, PulteGroup, and other homebuilders to equip new homes with mini-data centers, so as to relieve the need to build and power much larger traditional centers. The article states the company "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." Could this be the solution to at least some of the problems hindering the rollout of greater data-center capacity for AI systems? "One big reason the XFRA model works is that the average American home only uses about 40 percent of its electrical capacity," Span said. "As big data center developers struggle to find power sources and distribution capacity, XFRA uses capacity that's already available."
The startup says they will launch a 100-home proof of concept within the year to see if the idea is viable.
The startup says they will launch a 100-home proof of concept within the year to see if the idea is viable.
Do the home owners (Score:2)
get free WiFi ?
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Presumably the homeowner is required to provide an internet connection. The servers will have a consumer grade connection, hopefully with unlimited bandwidth but possibly in violation of commercial use rules that many ISPs have. They may not appreciate latency spikes when the homeowner does some heavy downloading.
There was a similar scheme in the UK a few years back, where they wanted to use the waste heat from the server to supply hot water. Most people have a central heating system that heats and circulat
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Using the waste heat makes much more sense in a new development, as the properties would be designed to make use of the waste heat rather than having to retrofit it later alongside a conventional heating system.
You would assume that the server farm would have its own connectivity, and having installed it they could use the same physical lines to provide service to the residents, so long as it's optional and you're not forced to use this specific provider (their service could be terrible).
Re:Do the home owners (Score:5, Informative)
That consumer connection is going to be a problem.
The whole point of AI datacenters is because you have these massive racks of AI servers and they need the ability to talk to one another really quickly. It's not just a server you can have in a homelab, it's 42U of GPUs as part of Nvidia's next-generation compute rack. And they need to talk to other such units quickly because you're going to be using dozens of racks in the training process.
And home consumer power is there because while the home will rarely use it all at once, they will be peaks. If you have 200A coming in, you add up all your breakers and you'll probably have 600A worth of loads. But some loads aren't used at the same time - your dryer might be 50A and your AC 40A, but they rarely go at the same time. Same with the stove which has a 40A plug. It's only becoming an issue because the next big load people are having are EVs and now people are starting to need some sort of power scheduling - usually in the form of a switch between the dryer and EV charger. (This is an issue because 200A is the practical maximum for the residential infrastructure - it's the highest you can get with a direct-measurement electric meter without having to upgrade to a whole new panel involving CTs to remotely measure current).
But it all works because even though we can draw 200A max, very few are doing it all the time, and with the exception of AC and stoves, most loads are run at random times so it even outs. Though even with AC there are plans on scheduling them so they don't all kick in at once - if you can have compressors going on in sequence or in a controlled manner, you can steady the load a bit.
100 homes acting as a data center may over load 1 (Score:2)
100 homes acting as a data center may over load 1 cable node.
Also mixed fiber / copper lines don't really have full power backup all the way back to the headend.
also power the homes you may over load the local power gird as well.
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"They may not appreciate latency spikes when the homeowner does some heavy downloading."
Special QoS features will need to be added to make sure the data center can lock out an owner's use of data.
"At least these guys can just dump a crate by your house, although they will still need power for it."
Think bigger! It won't be "your house" much longer, this idea isn't viable if homeowners have a choice. Force it into every new home, let buyers hope the rules aren't changed any further.
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"Span says XFRA is being installed during the construction process at no cost to the homeowner—and that the system has already been rolled out in a small number of communities."
"The exact arrangement will vary from one neighborhood or region to the next, but it’s likely that Span will take on paying the host’s electricity and internet bills directly, and charge a flat fee every month that’s much lower than what the host would otherwise pay to their e
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Sounds kinda dodgy. If you have to pay them for internet and electricity, they could hike the prices up later.
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Per the article, the homeowner has to pay to have this unit at their house, but the cost of the monthly fee goes to also cover ISP.
So you don't get free anything, but they claim that, in theory, you would get lower monthly bill than ISP + Utility.
Re: Do the home owners (Score:2)
FTA âoeThe exact arrangement will vary from one neighborhood or region to the next, but itâ(TM)s likely that Span will take on paying the hostâ(TM)s electricity and internet bills directly, and charge a flat fee every month thatâ(TM)s much lower than what the host would otherwise pay to their electric utility and internet service provider,"
Personally, I wouldnâ(TM)t accept this without a payout plus coverage of all my electric bill plus an upgraded internet tube (free) plus access t
Re: Do the home owners (Score:4, Funny)
Now think about it the smart way - if the company fails and nobody comes to take the hardware, what did you just get for free? "liquid-cooled NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs."
The only reason I'd want to take it down would be to bring it inside.
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Well, you just said flat out, user pays $150/month in lieu of ISP+power.
Note that last month my ISP+Power was less than $100/month (thanks to solar offsetting it).
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Well, you just said flat out, user pays $150/month in lieu of ISP+power.
Note that last month my ISP+Power was less than $100/month (thanks to solar offsetting it).
Since all new homes in Ca now require solar be installed, this sounds pretty dodgy. Plus how large is this installation? Plus there will be an easement preventing you from doing anything within a certain area of the installation and to provide access from the street for any repairs/upgrades. I expect this to plan to fail quickly. Personally, I think the answer to the power issue is to eliminate the need for giant AI data centers all together.
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You get free noise pollution, free heat and free view of the unit in question.
Also, lol... Welcome to the AI boom, where everyone is out to
deliver gigawatts of new compute capacity
like it is 1998.
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or 2077.
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"Span is incorporating technology from Nvidia into its system, including a liquid-cooled, fanless component inside the server. The design helps eliminate the noise typically associated with data centers—a frequent complaint in communities near large facilities."
"The equipment itself is designed to blend into the home’s exterior, with compact white XFRA boxes installed alongside things like air conditioning units and electrical panels"
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I'm sure you'll get three things I mention.
I didn't read the blurb, I saw the picture. It is as big and ugly as your mom, it has a big fan and it is definitely a thing your HOA will ban.
You know what to do next - go sue them.
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It is probably not a scam but there isn't any demand for this type of thing. ... I don't know but not much
Examples:
storj - 28000 provider/users trying to serve a few 10s of PB
salad - paying a couple of cents per hour for rtx 4060 GPU
filecoin - exabytes of storage serving
Businesses don't want their data on a server in someone's backyard, they want it in a SOC 2 data centre
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Get free heat as well. Be a target for theft and also back of the line when it comes to power consumption. Sorry, you can't use your own electricity today, it's cloudy and someone needs to run this query. Might even require a backup gas powered generator. Those things are so freaking loud.
Plus it will probably raise your insurance rates and when it becomes outdated, and it will you will be stuck with it.
Good idea, probably too premature to execute.
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Picturing Hero Protaganist crashing his pizza delivery car into some backyard rack storage.
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"Homeowners: Receive a premium SPAN Panel, battery backup, and optional solar plus fixed, discounted rates for electricity and internet."
Re: Do the home owners (Score:2)
With a potential of millions of host homes, Iâ(TM)m betting theyâ(TM)ll have plenty of people lining up no matter how small the financial benefit it.
Races to the bottom are always good for those at the top.
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get free WiFi ?
I bet not, but they could get free heating by circulating the cooling water to the houses.
So how'd you like to move to Alaska or Iceland? Or dare I say Greenland? But that trick never worked for Siberia.
I'm in. (Score:2)
I expect a lot of us nerds already have a "mini datacenter" homelab from parts we've scavenged over the years. If someone wants to pay me to upgrade my home infrastructure I'm more than willing to talk about it.
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More like the opposite.
They would want to divert resources away from your usage and into a locked enclosure that you would not have access to.
It would not upgrade your home infrastructure one bit. You even still have to pay them for the privilege, though they argue it will be less than you would have otherwise paid to an ISP and utility company.
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YUP. You've got it.
Spreading out data center demands does not reduce them just spreads them out. Maybe they have some creative accounting that makes initial construction cheaper; long term is what matters, and these large data centers get lobbying power which they abuse.
It is not cheaper centralized management or placed closer to resources. Latency doesn't matter for most needs; we're talking speed of light so distances are not a real problem or cost. Even gaming, the other players also need to be local wh
Stadia (Score:2)
This is mind boggling stupid.... (Score:2)
- The last mile power and comms is questionable (the grid may have 40% capacity)
- The availability will suck
- The latency will suck
- The downtime until a operator can get out to fix it will really suck
- Homeowners will kick them out after the first 3:00am service call
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Then there is the noise factor and the fact that the homeowner may need more electricity (electric car, pool, hot tub, etc).
I built my house. My builder pushed back on me when I asked for a 400A service. He said I'd never need it since I didn't have plans for a pool. Gave me a 200A service.
Now with 2 electric cars, a finished basement, and patio lighting I have two subpanels in addition to the main panel.
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There's something fundamentally wrong with the idea that a suburban house requires a 44kW supply even with 2 electric cars and a pool. My parents have a pool too, and a 3 story house, they are getting on fine with their 32A service fuse.
What are you doing? Running a commercial EV charging enterprise from your house? A secret bitcoin mine in your basement? Lighting your patio with growing lamps for weed? Using your pool pump to create a wave pool?
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"My parents have a pool too, and a 3 story house, they are getting on fine with their 32A service fuse."
People got along fine before electricity too. Meanwhile, electricians know how to calculate loads and modern 3 story home with a pool would not get a 32A service, if such a thing even existed. 32A wouldn't be sized properly for air alone.
"What are you doing? Running a commercial EV charging enterprise from your house?"
I built a lake house back around 2000, it had a 400A service. There are reasons to do
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Server rack submerged in the deep end of the pool.
Re:This is mind boggling stupid.... (Score:4, Informative)
You need to do the math. I live in an all electric house up north. 12 KW goes to the various heating units. The stove is rated for 11 KW if everything in on like say Thanksgiving dinner. The water heater is 5 KW. I can't read the clothes dryer tag but it's on a 30 amp circuit just like the water heater.
Then add a dishwasher, microwave, and a vacuum cleaner (which is a surprisingly big power hog).
So the 200 amp service is pretty well loaded if all that is on at the same time, and that is what you have to design for. Sure a Smart home could juggle loads to some extent, shutting off the dryer and the water heater if the load goes up too high, but the prioritization is not simple.
And don't whine at me to get a heat pump. I have one and I like it, but it stops working at -5 F, then it's up to the resistors.
Just for reference my wintertime power use is three times summertime use. Last year I used the heat pump in AC mode for part of 21 days, typically 6 to 8 hours. It is in heating mode from mid October to the end of April.
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I like how you create your arguments assuming the premise is valid. Your points are good, but the fact is that this is just a ploy to pocket first round funding from VC. They're all laughing about how stupid it is, as well.
Nothing like piggybacking on unused 220V capacity for cost savings by deploying dedicated fiber networking to a million locations that you have to pay to construct. I think even Marc Andreessen can see through this.
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Seriously, did anyone commenting read any of the linked material?
Silicon Valley in a nutshell (Score:3)
"Could this be the solution to at least some of the problems hindering the rollout of greater data-center capacity for AI systems?"
No.
"One big reason the XFRA model works is that the average American home only uses about 40 percent of its electrical capacity,"
But what is remains is a pittance compares to what is needed for data centers. Worse, it's not consumption capacity that matters, it's generation capacity.
"As big data center developers struggle to find power sources and distribution capacity, XFRA uses capacity that's already available."
No, they don't and no it doesn't. "Big data center developers" struggle to find power, "sources and distribution" are just details. Meanwhile, unused home capacity does not solve any distribution problem and does not provide either power or a power source.
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Wait, THAT industry?!? (Score:2)
After watching quite a few videos of CyFy the Home Inspector enlighten America as to how the stench of home building quality hasn’t changed much since Chinese drywall was wafting over it, I have NO idea why anyone would consider them as qualified to build a data center.
They can barely remember to get sober enough to wire the stove up right.
Good luck with that, homebuyers.
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"the stench of home building quality hasn’t changed much since Chinese drywall was wafting over it..."
No discussion can't be improved without adding some right-wing bigotry, eh?
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"the stench of home building quality hasn’t changed much since Chinese drywall was wafting over it..."
No discussion can't be improved without adding some right-wing bigotry, eh?
When you can find the liberal Democratic socialist who said ”no thanks, I’m fine with it” after being told their drywall needs to be ripped out for valid health reasons, then I’ll believe you have a point there, Baity McBullshitbaiter.
Re:Wait, THAT industry?!? (Score:4, Informative)
Certainly not defending bigotry, but there was, about 15-20 years ago, a big issue with Chinese drywall being used in home construction. The root cause of why it was used was a material shortage in the south east due to a severe hurricane season. For those who bought a house built with it, or those who remodeled before the issue was known, it was a potential financial disaster for them. Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Recently found out our built in 2008 house, it's stove is only wired for 110v. And stove outlet is on an inner wall.
Still, might take out a half wall creating a passthrough from kitchen to dining area join the space into an eat in kitchen. Can then put stove on outside wall and run 220v server easy enough.
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Just... no. (Score:5, Insightful)
The local domestic electricity supply infrastructure is built out knowing that each household won't use 100% of their individual supply capacity, in the same way that ISPs have always oversold a neighbourhood's actual backhaul capacity. See also airlines, etc.
As soon as they add this always-on load to the local infrastructure, service is going to degrade.
In addition, it doesn't matter if the load is dispersed like this or all in one place in a DC - you still need to have the generation and transmission capacity to support the load.
Oh, and what about cooling?
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Correct, it's a "solution" that solves nothing and creates enormous additional cost, maintenance and complexity. But maybe it can score a few million in funding.
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Then, as you noted, there's the cooling problem, which also doesn't scale. Neither does the noise problem: people live in quiet places because, well, quiet. A thousand little data centers running 24 hours a day isn't going to mesh well with that.
This entire concept is insanely stupid -- but no doubt some VCs will throw money at thes
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Also the high-density LLM racks each can use more power than a typical home has available. My house has 200A 240V split-phase power, which is fairly typical - that's a theoretical max of 48kW. Just one nVidia rack can draw 120kW.
IIRC my typical home usage peak is around 12kW (I am in the southeastern US and have a heat pump, so the day or two every year or two it gets really cold I'll get resistive heating). So let's say I have 36kW "excess" (and assume the utility could deliver that to every house); that's
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As for cooling, "Span is incorporating technology from Nvidia into its system, including a liquid-cooled, fanless component inside the server. The design helps eliminate the noise typically associated with data centers—a frequent compla
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You don't know if it's always on. Those details aren't present (that I saw), and it's likely that they would throttle when the grid was under heavy load. A reasonable inference from what the company (who make "smart" electric panels) is saying about power management.
As for cooling, "Span is incorporating technology from Nvidia into its system, including a liquid-cooled, fanless component inside the server. The design helps eliminate the noise typically associated with data centers—a frequent complaint in communities near large facilities."
It's also possible to pair it with a large residential roof solar installation. I installed solar recently (just in time to grab the 30% credit) and my system routinely generates 3X what my home uses in the course of a day (I typically use about 40 kWh per day, and often generate 130+kWh per day). I've been thinking I'd really like to find something to suck up that extra power, because the monthly net billing plan I have means that once I've zeroed out my bill for the month, I get no benefit from addition
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This draws additional electricity from the domestic grid which ultimately will drive up prices for the consumer. Datacenters need to provide their own source(either by adding to the grid, or cogeneration) to compensate for the larger energy draw.
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Precisely this. Power, like ISP data, is already oversubscribed. A normal home running all normal loads and full AC probably does not hit 50% of the rated service load. When heatwaves cause rolling blackouts it is not because homes are using 100% of their service capacity, the service region has just approached 100 of the capacity of the high voltage feeders connecting it to the grid.
A data center is a huge single spot load, and requires significant infrastructure to tie to the grid, but a data center als
Problem being.. (Score:3)
"One big reason the XFRA model works is that the average American home only uses about 40 percent of its electrical capacity,"
Yes, sure, on the individual level, a house may average 40 percent and the 200A is just peak demand and/or anomalous residences, but I guarantee that the grid is *not* sized for everyone to continuously pull down 200A all the time.
When power demand gets pressure due to prolonged weather events, you get rolling blackouts precisely because the grid is not sized to handle the load, even though *technically* everyone is operating within their individual 'capacity'.
Power grids are oversubscribed, and this concept pretends that the aren't.
From a... (Score:2)
From a "Chicken in every pot" and "a car in every garage" to now a "data center in every yard" or "a data center in every family plot" but at one point in the 1950s the dream was every home to have its own nuclear reactor for its own power. The circle of progress...
JoshK.
Incredibly dumb (Score:2)
The homeowner may only use 40% of their typical capacity, but that capacity is assumed internationally in grid design. The local grids are not remotely sized for all homes to use their rated service capacity. You can see this already in places where electric vehicles are prevalent, the local grids completely struggle to keep up with the assigned load when suddenly everyone is actually using it. The capacity factor isn't there.
That said this may work if only a few houses in any given area run a small datacen
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I think the idea is that your electric will be temporarily disconnected when Elon Musk wants to run an inference. Too bad if there's life support equipment that fails, that's a "you" problem. Make sure you pay your mortgage along with your spouse's funeral, otherwise Musk will foreclose.
But yeah, those "killowatts" of AI compute are really gonna add up! A few houses at a time.
Extra Cost Being Built Right Into a New Home (Score:2)
Nothing like making home ownership even more expensive, and it's built right in. Extra power consumption and cooling requirements all from the original plan. Might be better in a colder climate, where the heat generated could offset the cost of heating the home itself, but this is just another environmental disaster in the making. Exactly what benefit is this to the home owner? Are they getting compensated for the presence of such a power-hungry monstrosity living like a troll in their basement/attic/gara
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I'ma Save You a Fortune And A lot Of Time (Score:2)
No need to wait a year for the proof of concept or it's later results. I can tell you right this very moment that this is not even remotely viable as a data center alternative. I can also tell you that this would not even be a good setup for personal data centers or computing home labs.
The only thing that this is good for -- the only thing -- is grifting investors. Your investment opportunity window opens today and likely closes next week. Get out by tomorrow or get fucked.
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The company has been making "smart" electric panels and meters since 2018, so it's not like they're fly-by-night.
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a supplement to allow inference to be offloaded somewhere that provides lower latency to end users?
It's still a terrible solution to something that is not actually a problem. You're misguidedly trying to replace distance latency, absurdly minimal, with what will be significant computer processing latency. All the while increasing hardware and power consumption costs, even if they are being distributed for suckers to pay.
The company has been making "smart" electric panels and meters since 2018
I've been making origami sing 2018, do you think that qualifies me to build and sell folding solar panel arrays to NASA?
This will not solve anything (Score:2)
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If you are having trouble getting approval for a big fat grid hookup or rezoning of what was supposed to be a fairly low excitement commercial/industrial plot into a datacenter; you might have less trouble getting some nice, innocuous, residential development with what are totally just the next generation of cable boxes if you don't look too closely in the back yard push
indirect benefit for AI (Score:2)
AI training need HUUUUGE datacenters. But AI inference may benefit from these smaller datacenters.
Ditto if you can move classic cloud workloads and associated gear (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS) to these smaller datacenters, freeing up your biggest datacenters for AI training.
I proposed to do something similar to that a while ago, using container data centers. But this may work even better.
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Who would want this? (Score:2)
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Assuming you can slip the thing, and some sort of cryptic easement or covenant burned into the deed, to at least one sucker it no longer matters whether the 'owner' wants it or not.
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At least that's the idea and the claims. They say they're already rolling it out in some new construction, at no extra cost to the homebuyers. Will it pan out? I don't know.
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"They say they're already rolling it out in some new construction, at no extra cost to the homebuyers."
"They say" is a pretty important part, how would anyone know? And are there hidden costs? And what is the cost to opt out?
My personal feeling is that home buyers won't like the idea of a business interest having preferential considerations for a home the buyer is paying for. There is absolutely no way there is "no cost to the homeowner".
"which may be $150, may be more, may be $0"
and it may be the deed to
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This will last about two weeks before (Score:2)
some HOA demigod decides its their job to restrict query contents.
Seems like a classic scam format. (Score:2)
It's not false; a given house is usually hooked up to a big chunky breaker whose capacity it is not expected to exceed, often oversized by a decent margin; but there absolutely isn't that level of overbuild all the way back to the utility. Probably not even back to the substation depending on how optimistically the transformers on the poles were sized.
Exactl
We're looking forward to some free ram. (Score:3)
So they want to place boxes full of ddr5 ram in people's back yards thinking they'll still be there tomorrow morning.
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Came here to say this. Also probably fairly beefy GPUs and other enterprise grade hardware, in someone's backyard. If this actually happens, it'll be interesting to observe the patterns as theft expands from people who actually know what they're after to meth-heads who figure there must be a bunch of copper in there and then are stuck trying to figure out where to fence RAM.
Terrible idea, I think. Big datacenters are all about security and economy of scale, this has neither.
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A number totally fabricated, of course. And you'd do that anyway, especially if you were granted immunity from prosecution. Perhaps that's the real appeal, the company provides free legal services for the murders you commit.
As long as you get yours, who cares what happens to others, right? So long as you defend the latest scams online.
If only it were _for_ the neighborhood (Score:2)
If the data center is primarily intended for use by (exclusively or nearly exclusively) the people in the neighborhood, sure, it could make sense. I know this is quaint and out-of-date but one can imagine a neighborhood squid cache, NNTP server, modern Netflix cache, etc for the neighborhood. Have it be connectable by a high-speed neighborhood LAN, to share the 'hood's WAN.
Just a classic neighborhood network coop, but with some added caching services, which is what would cause it to be called a "datacenter"
Um no (Score:2)
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You will of your AI overlords tell you to! Otherwise power might become unreliable at your own home and internet service disconnected.
Space heaters make sense, DCs don't (Score:2)
The idea of having someone put one of your servers in their home and using it to produce heat makes sense. The requirements are low and if one server goes down it doesn't affect your cloud much.
The idea of having someone have a bunch of your servers at their home makes none. They don't have a SLA for power and it's difficult and expensive to get carrier-grade networking at their address.
Zoning (Score:2)
Residential zoning WILL NOT allow this.
DOA.
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Cute... you think these companies won't get some exception for this.
They will frame it as home owner choice to enhance their property and solve some end user problem of AI compute that we all really want and make homes more affordable.
In reality, the house will be pre-built with this thing that you will have no rights to and will not be able to opt out, i.e. have it removed or powered off when you purchase the home or chose to no longer support the service/business. You will be financially liable for prett
Oh fuck no (Score:2)
And there is no way in hell this is going to be just one or two of these damn things they're going to be all over the fucking place causing problems.
This is an attempt to get around locals that have figured out that data centers are bad bad bad news. No jobs, use of all your electricity and water and they cause painful noise pollution.
Does this make any sense? (Score:2)
Damn ! (Score:2)
robust (Score:2)
What when something breaks ? (Score:2)
In a data center the repair tech needs to walk past a few racks to replace what is broken. With this setup s/he will need to drive somewhere, fix whatever, drive back - assuming that the remote diagnostics were correct and that they brought the right parts first time. Then there is access: "we are having a kids' party today, beware the supersoakers."
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Don't forget the purchase agreement for the house which will include a permanent license to come by, any hour of the day or night, for maintenance.
Good idea, but only if... (Score:2)
The homeowner owns it
All code runs locally for the exclusive use of the homeowner
It doesn't require a subscription
Extremely Dangerous Concept (Score:2)
Residential electrical utility connections are only sized based on 30-35% of the nameplate service size by the utility. Add an extra 100A to a "200A" service and you will be burning out infrastructure right and left,and likely a few homes too.
If the house has sufficient solar and battery it can work, but most jurisdictions it is not legal to have that much of either.
More Noise and Problems (Score:2)
Enough already with constant white noise in suburbia. Passenger cars, delivery trucks every 2 hours, delivery drones, home generators etc. The noise of an inner city is inherent, but it doesn't need to be that way for the 'burbs.
Also, what happens when a kid kicks a soccer ball at one of those things? Or the lawnmower flings a rock it?
Does the "data center" owner have unrestricted access to the it and consequently my property?
Does it have to be next to my house?
Can it be moved if I want to repurpose the
Good luck with that (Score:2)
A modest proposal (Score:2)
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If it pans out.
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/. employs incompetent buffoons that call themselves "editors" while stealing articles written by others, frequently from other sites. Moderation is performed by the customers, /. is the very definition of "don't give a shit, just cashing checks". Their inspiration is to run a business even more lazy, ignorant and corrupt than SuperKendall.