Are you hosting part of an AI data center at your home?

A solar and home energy storage company is expanding into AI data centers, but not by building one, but rather offering to pay its customers to put its computing units in their homes. Sunrun launches pilot program for new project “Distributed Artificial Intelligence Computation” program. It would “place multiple compute nodes in homes equipped with Sunrun’s solar and battery storage systems.” Customers will be “compensated” for participating in the pilot program.

Sunrun plans to sell the distributed computing power from the nodes to “enterprise computing buyers,” such as artificial intelligence companies. It’s a new approach to finding resources and space for AI computing infrastructure, as data centers face growing opposition across the country. A poll released in May showed this More than 70 percent of Americans They oppose the construction of new data centers in their area, often because of concerns about pollution, noise, and interference Use of water and electricity.

Instead of consolidating computing power into one large data center, Sunrun will distribute it among smaller compute units spread across the country. Sunrun says it has previously conducted a “successful” proof of concept for this program, but it is not yet clear how successful it will be. This is a completely new area for Sunrun, which mainly focuses on home energy storage. Sunrun’s 1.1 million customers can subscribe to Pilot program waiting list If they are open to hosting a compute node. The company says it “expects to complete the pilot program in the coming months and will evaluate the results” before rolling out the program more broadly.