You can put a data center at your house—but who really pays?

Nvidia has put its name behind a fledgling effort to put mini-data centers beside people’s homes in boxes that look like HVAC units. It’s a “power” play, considering that the main bottleneck to building out data center capacity is not money or chips, but rather retrofitting the electrical grid to supply the power. The idea, put forward by a California smart utility box company called Span, is to put the GPUs where the power has already been allocated - at the home. Span says the average household uses only about 42% of the electricity allotted to it, and rarely reaches peak usage.