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The startup Perimeter Compute is emerging from stealth today, Latitude Media has learned, with plans to join the emerging edge computing market in major U.S. cities by using the excess energy capacity found in commercial office buildings.
The company is within the portfolio of Montauk Capital, a venture firm based in New York City that recruits experienced founders to run new startups in the digital infrastructure space. David Hall, a former executive at the AI neocloud Lambda, is Perimeter’s CEO.
“I walked through some buildings in New York and Boston and was astounded that they have everything a data center has: space, cooling, and power,” Hall told Latitude Media in an interview. “And after years of energy conservation efforts, they have reduced their power consumption between 30% and 60%, yet the infrastructure is still designed for that peak load they started with.”
Hall said Perimeter plans to install the latest AI chips in the basements and mechanical rooms of Class A commercial office buildings with between half a megawatt and 20 MWs of spare capacity. That amount of distributed capacity is meaningful in today’s market, where data centers are facing numerous construction bottlenecks including equipment shortages and a strapped power grid. Even half a megawatt of power is enough to serve 240 of NVIDIA’s latest GPUs, which can process billions of user requests per day, Hall said.
