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Ars Technica AIPublished: May 13, 2026, 10:00 JST1 min read

SPAN plans to deploy thousands of mini AI data centers in US homes, with a 100-home trial run this year and scaling to 80,000 nodes by 2027.

SPAN plans to deploy thousands of mini AI data centers in US homes, with a 100-home trial run this year and scaling to 80,000 nodes by 2027.

3 Key Points

  1. SPAN, a San Francisco startup, announced a 'distributed data center solution' that would install XFRA nodes containing liquid-cooled Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs in newly constructed homes. The company is already running pilot tests in preparation for a 100-home trial run this year.

  2. Each XFRA node would hold 16 Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs and 4 AMD EPYC Server CPUs, paired with a wall-mounted smart panel and 16 kilowatt-hour battery. Homeowners would have electricity and Internet bills paid by SPAN, either at a flat fee (the company mentioned $150 as an example) or possibly no fee, while nodes operate using excess power capacity within the standard 200-amp electrical service found in most modern US homes.

  3. SPAN claims it could install 8,000 XFRA units at a cost five times lower than building a typical 100-megawatt data center with the same compute capacity. The nodes would support cloud gaming, content streaming, and AI inference rather than large-scale model training, which would remain the domain of centralized data centers run by companies like Google and Microsoft.

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