SPAN, a San Francisco startup, wants to transform American homes into nodes of a distributed data center network. The company's XFRA units would sit alongside houses, packing 16 Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell GPUs along with 4 AMD EPYC CPUs and 3TB of memory. Homeowners would receive free or heavily subsidized electricity and internet in exchange for hosting the equipment.

Each node runs on 80 amps of the typical 200-amp residential electrical service, operating around the clock. SPAN pairs the installation with a wall-mounted smart panel and 16 kWh battery to manage power draw. The company claims 8,000 XFRA units could be deployed at one-fifth the cost of building a traditional 100-megawatt data center. A 100-home pilot launches this year, scaling to 80,000 nodes nationwide by 2027.

This approach targets AI inference tasks like cloud gaming and content streaming rather than intensive model training. It could help utilities avoid costly grid upgrades while sidestepping community opposition that often blocks large data center projects. However, experts raise questions about whether distributed nodes can handle varied computational demands and whether spreading infrastructure across suburban homes creates new security vulnerabilities.