Although the details of how this arrangement will work have not been worked out, Span is already preparing to test the system’s potential with a 100-home trial, expected to begin later this year. The plan will see the company’s XFRA units installed alongside new-build homes. These units will act as distributed data centers, connecting and drawing power from the home’s electrical connection to complement hyperscale data centers by supporting “workloads that can run on smaller hardware,” such as AI inference, cloud gaming, and high-performance simulation.
How Span’s XFRA system will work
According to a white paper document, Span would pay the homeowner to subsidize their electricity and internet bills, while a Realtor.com article suggests the company could cover those utility costs directly and possibly charge a flat fee of up to $150 per month. These details do not yet appear to have been completely worked out, but it is possible that programs vary by neighborhood. Additionally, Span says it could install 8,000 XFRA units about six times faster than a new data center could be built, and these installations could be accomplished at a cost about five times lower than building a large-scale data center.
Span will use Nvidia technology to bring the small servers to life, sourcing Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 GPUs, which have been liquid-cooled to provide solid temperature ranges. Span says that by bringing these miniature data centers into people’s homes, it can harness the unused energy that residential homes offer instead of having to expand completely onto the power grid. The company looked at the electrical capacity the average home needs and set the maximum draw for a single XFRA node at 80 amps because it found that most homes with a 200 amp utility almost always have 80 amps.
Not everyone is convinced
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However, as with most big things involving AI these days, not everyone is convinced that it will be as great an idea as Span claims. Indeed, many have posted online about how dangerous this seems as a security or theft issue, with one person on Reddit noting that there’s a very big reason why data centers tend to have as much security as they do. Others pointed to issues with convenience, such as noise pollution, maintenance intervals, or young children using it as a baseball target.
Others are also concerned about how easily companies could harvest your data online. If your internet runs through the company as the implications suggest, then Span – and any other company with access to the database – could potentially use it to extract information about what websites you might visit and more. This is one of the problems with using public Wi-Fi networks, which is why many people recommend never using them in the first place. For now, the exact nature of how (or when) everything will work remains up in the air. However, with the first iteration of his plan expected to take place later this year, it shouldn’t take long to see how Span’s big – or rather small – data center idea will work.
