This company wants to install a mini data center in your backyard
Compute nodes located in small residential areas would come with discounted electricity rates to residents.
San Francisco-based startup SPAN has announced the launch of “a distributed data center solution,” XFRA, aimed at placing compute nodes in residential and small commercial spaces.
The company hopes that it will help address the compute needs of “hyperscalers, neoscalers and AI cloud providers,” with Nvidia among the initial launch partners, according to a press release.
SPAN plans to deploy enterprise-grade, liquid-cooled XFRA nodes containing NVIDIA RTX PRO™ 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs, starting later this year, and is working with leading homebuilders like PulteGroup.
While nearly half (47%) of Americans oppose new data centers being built near their homes, SPAN says the company’s solution is a “win-win situation.”
Homeowners will receive a premium SPAN Panel, battery backup, and optional solar. This would come with fixed, discounted rates for electricity and internet.
For scalers, the company says, it would provide “immediate, flexible capacity for inference and cloud gaming without the multi-year lead times of traditional data centers.”
SPAN will run a 100-home trial this year and hopes to scale up to 80,000 XFRA nodes across the US, providing more than 1 gigawatt of distributed compute, according to Ars Technica.
The demand for data centers has been rapidly increasing, primarily due to developments in AI and cloud computing, and is transforming global energy consumption.
In 2024, US data centers accounted for more than 4% of America’s total electricity consumption, and are predicted to exceed 9% by 2030.
Data centers require infrastructure improvements for electricity transmission and distribution, such as new high-voltage lines.
These costs are then passed on to consumers through changing rate designs, while deferred from data center operators through special contracts or incentive packages.
In Northern Virginia, home to Data Center Alley, residents living near data centers saw electricity prices for a single month 267% higher than five years ago, according to a Bloomberg analysis.
In response to soaring energy bills, the Donald Trump administration and leading AI companies and hyperscalers signed the Ratepayer Protection Pledge in March 2026.
Under the pledge, the companies agreed to cover the costs of all power-delivery infrastructure upgrades required for their data centers.
SPAN says XFRA is not intended to replace centralized data centers, but instead “augment them by accelerating capacity growth at the grid edge” by leveraging underutilized power infrastructure in close proximity to end-users’ demand.
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