Despite our beloved gaming PCs being designed to expel heat as efficiently as possible, they’re not actually that great at heating a drafty home office (ask me how I know). Still, as temperatures drop, and heating bills soar, you can’t blame a girl for wanting to get a bit creative about heating her space—though I think I’d have to draw the line at welcoming a mini data centre into my home.
Well, according to the BBC, that’s one of the options being offered as part of a pilot scheme in the UK. As part of the project, participants Terrence and Lesley Bridges replaced their gas boiler with the mini data centre in question and claim their bills have dropped from £375 a month (almost $500) to only £40 a month (about $50). The kicker? The data centre, which comprises 500 teeny tiny Raspberry Pi computers, is still compact enough to fit inside their outdoor shed.
Terrence Bridges is pleased with the swap, citing both the savings made and the device’s impressive heat output… as well as another line of reasoning that personally gives me pause. He told the BBC, “I think it’s fantastic because it’s eco-friendly. We’re not burning any gases, so it’s green—it’s environmentally friendly.”
Called the HeatHub, the diminutive data centre was developed by Thermify, and is currently being offered as part of the Shield Project, an “initiative designed to make the transition to Net Zero more accessible for low-income residents.” 50 homes participating in the scheme now have HeatHubs, but the distributed heating offered by these data centres isn’t a one size fits all solution. So, the Shield Project also offers solar panels, solar batteries, and even peer-to-peer energy trading to reach that Net Zero goal.
However, while the HeatHub may be more ‘eco-friendly’ than a gas boiler at the point of use, long term, I think solar panels are still the clear winner—and that’s to say nothing of how resource-intensive running a collective of HeatHubs may be if the Shield Project is ever scaled up.
At the very least, though the scheme’s HeatHubs will eventually be linked up as part of a remote and distributed data centre, they’re not powerful enough to do the technical heavy-lifting demanded by AI—so, there’s that. Thermify CEO Travis Theune says that instead they’ll likely analyse large datasets or potentially run apps.
Still, the demand for data centres in recent years has sky-rocketed. Even though AI is not the sole cause, one report earlier this year put things in perspective by suggesting that AI energy demands alone may soon quadruple. As such, a number of major players are exploring getting creative when it comes to meeting rising energy demands.
Google, for example, has looked to small modular nuclear reactors as one way to power its many multiplying AWS data centres. While in conversation with the BBC, Google CEO Sundar Pichai assured listeners that the company was invested in developing “new sources of energy”—though presently the wider industry does still rely considerably on non-renewables.
While huddling around a tiny, non-AI data centre for heat doesn’t sound too bad, it’s difficult to forget the fact we’re all paying the price—often literally—for big tech’s increasing energy demands.
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