Sunrun joins the emerging edge computing market

Sunrun, the residential solar and battery company, is testing a new idea: turning homes with its solar and storage systems into small data centers. The pilot installs "nodes" built with Nvidia chips, about the size of a mini fridge, in select homes. The chips handle AI "inference" work, meaning the actual running of chatbots and similar programs, rather than the heavier work of training AI models. A similar test is underway from Span, a smart electric panel maker, in 100 newly built homes this year.

The idea is to ease pressure on the power grid, which is struggling to keep up with AI's growing electricity demand. Building new power plants or transmission lines can take a decade or more, while Sunrun already adds roughly a gigawatt of solar and storage capacity every year across its customer base. Rather than concentrating computing power in one massive facility, Sunrun wants to spread it across many homes that already generate more solar power than they need.

For participating homeowners, Sunrun would cover the added electricity cost of running the chip and pay homeowners for hosting it, on top of whatever solar and storage payment plan they already have. The company says its Flex program, launched last year, is designed to pair extra solar and battery capacity with this kind of use. Sunrun has not said how many homes are currently enrolled in the pilot or how many it hopes to reach, so it's not yet available broadly.