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Dive Brief:
Sunrun is expanding a “distributed data center” pilot that will place computing hardware in homes already outfitted with its solar and battery energy storage systems, the company said on July 8.
Unlike larger, centralized data centers that could increase the load on already-congested transmission and distribution networks, the smaller computing nodes will benefit the grid by increasing utilization of existing infrastructure, Sunrun said.
Sunrun’s announcement comes about three months after SPAN, an electrical hardware startup, unveiled its own distributed compute initiative in partnership with NVIDIA. SPAN and NVIDIA executives said at the time that the concept would help technology companies sidestep the grid power constraints delaying the startup of traditional data centers while improving their AI models’ performance.
