SPAN

Another great feature on XFRA, our newly announced distributed data center solution, this time from Fortune’s Sasha Rogelberg, who highlighted how XFRA units can bring AI capacity online faster and relieve stress on the electrical grid. Learn more in the full article below: https://lnkd.in/gnHDxzfE

Thanks to Josh Lipton of Yahoo Finance for having SPAN CEO Arch Rao on the Asking for a Trend show on Thursday. Arch’s live in-studio breakdown of our new XFRA distributed data center solution was featured in not one but two clips, which you can check out below: https://lnkd.in/gzr5FABp https://lnkd.in/gQ26NHtn

“Networks of XFRA nodes make electricity more affordable for the entire community because they increase sales over grid infrastructure that already exists, saving utilities from costly upgrades to support big data centers,” said Chris Lander VP of XFRA, in Ars Technica. Thanks to Jeremy Hsu for covering: https://lnkd.in/dSTaiaFP . This gets at the heart of what XFRA is all about: saving time and money, while getting more out of the electrical grid we already have. It’s an idea that Ari Peskoe, director of the Harvard University Electricity Law Institute, said is "fascinating." We couldn’t agree more.

Nvidia’s New Partnership Wants to Put Mini AI Data Centers on Your House Check out XFRA in Inc. Magazine. Thanks to Moses JeanFrancois for covering XFRA and what it means for the future of energy and AI infrastructure. Read the full piece here: https://lnkd.in/g6iE9VBX 

Diana Olick has the story on XFRA in this morning’s CNBC Property Play.  XFRA unlocks speed to power by tapping into available, underutilized grid infrastructure in homes, bringing benefits to homeowners and hyperscalers alike. Read and watch: https://lnkd.in/eRJnubTV As Arch put it, “We’re uniquely positioned to build infrastructure that can simultaneously help us meet what is clearly an insatiable demand for more compute, much more cost effectively, while benefiting individual consumers.” Together with our partners NVIDIA and PulteGroup Group, we’re eager to get our win-win, down-to-earth data center solution out into the world.  

Thanks to Catherine Boudreau of Latitude Media for exclusively covering the launch of XFRA last week. XFRA is the first distributed data center using existing infrastructure and underutilized power capacity to meet expanding AI compute demand: “Our hypothesis at SPAN has been that the existing distribution network operates at only 40 to 45% utilization, nominally,” Arch Rao, founder and CEO of SPAN, told Latitude Media. “So there’s plenty of headroom on the existing system that can be used in a more effective way. And then we’re able to deliver [AI] compute much faster.” Read the full article here: https://lnkd.in/ekb4EmXM 

⚡ We're excited to welcome Reynolds Holmes as VP of Product at SPAN! 🎉 Rey joins the SPAN team with deep product experience launching first-of-a-kind hardware, software and services for Tesla and GAF Energy. He understands the space, he understands the complexity of building physical products that have to work in the real world, and we're thrilled to have him shaping what's next at SPAN. Welcome to the team, Rey! #CleanEnergy #Electrification #ProductLeadership

Will you be at SF Climate Week this year? Here’s where to find us throughout the week📍 Links to register in the comments. #sfclimateweek #SFCW #electrify The Energy Summit

We are buzzing from yesterday’s XFRA keynote at the Latitude Media #TransitionAI event. Arch described how rapid expansion of AI workloads has created a “hyperscaler paradox.” Compute demand is scaling quickly, but even if data center build-out can keep up, the power delivery infrastructure becomes a bottleneck. This is a problem we know how to solve. SPAN unlocks underutilized power capacity in homes to enable home electrification. XFRA uses that same headroom to bring to market new compute capacity faster and cheaper than traditional data center build outs. XFRA is a natural extension of the SPAN mission, better utilizing the infrastructure we already have to deliver affordable, future-ready energy solutions. 2026 is already a huge year for SPAN. And we’re just getting started.

Your home could be worth $1M (more). As a datacenter. In the latest edition of everything is a datacenter… yes, it’s true, your home *could* be a datacenter. And it could solve the compute-constraint that is causing Claude to degrade (I’d be degraded too if I added $21B of annualized revenue in the last few months…). Yes, you should be confused. Fortunately our friends at SPAN have been very, very busy and are not confused. They launched the Utilize Coalition as one of the founding members alongside Tesla, Google, Carrier, Verrus, and others to drive utilization of our grid above ~50% (its current utilization), potentially dropping fixed cost allocation to all ratepayers. This is not the first time I’ve mentioned my (un?)healthy obsession with increasing grid utilization and decreasing per-user costs after 22+ years of investing in the space. After deploying tens of thousands of SPAN smart home panels and enabling more than 200 amps of load to sit behind 200 amps of utility service due to their very fancy UL 3141 Power Control Systems (PCS) certification (widely accepted across permitting jurisdictions, thank you very much), SPAN realized that very few 200 amp homes exceed ~80 amps of load at a given time, leaving ~80 amps available when accounting for 40 amps of reserve. 80A x 240V = 19.2 kW. If you use all 80 amps of excess capacity across ~5,000 houses, you end up with… 100 MW of power delivery. Or ~50,000 houses for 1 GW. That’s nice. But maybe useless unless… somebody develops a data center product with this excess grid capacity. Good day to you, SPAN XFRA. 🫡 XFRA is a SPAN-integrated compute package designed to deploy distributed inference capacity as fast as homeowners and builders can say yes. Without grid upgrades or additional generation. And yes, for those naysayers, you can’t really use all the excess capacity 24/7 without prematurely accelerating the demise of distribution infrastructure (think pole top transformers and substations) and dispatching less clean sources of generation during peak hours. But still, it works (and you can ramp down compute if the system gets backed up... aka, flexibility!). So who cares? Well… using the math above: $50B (according to Nvidia) of Capex for every 1GW, and 1GW = 50,000 homes, you end up with $50B/50,000 = ~$1M of asset value per home. That is… like ~2.5x more asset value than the median US home. Presumably some of this value will accrue to the site host (aka homeowner). But it is all enabled by some (very) fancy power management courtesy of SPAN! Will your home be a datacenter? Cc Congruent Ventures Tanuj Dutta Arch Rao