A version of this article first appeared in the CNBC Property Play newsletter with Diana Olick. Property Play covers new and evolving opportunities for the real estate investor, from individuals to venture capitalists, private equity funds, family offices, institutional investors and large public companies. Sign up to receive future editions, straight to your inbox. Even as more local communities rise up against the proliferation of massive, energy- and water-sucking data centers, some big players in housing are betting consumers would be willing to put mini data centers right on the walls of their homes. Span is a California-based startup that originally launched with so-called “smart” electrical panels designed to help homeowners save money on their electric bills. Now, with the help of Nvidia, it has come up with something new – small, fractional data centers, or “nodes,” called XFRA units, that can be put on the side of residential homes and small commercial businesses. The idea is to take advantage of unused electrical capacity on local grids, which the Span smart panels can pinpoint. The rapid growth of artificial intelligence has strained local power grids nationwide and, in some cases, resulted in higher electric bills for homeowners. A network of these nodes, communicating with each other across the country, is the equivalent of a small to mid-sized traditional data center, which could either augment an existing center or negate the need to build a new one, Span says. Hyperscalers and AI cloud providers just tap into the network as they would a traditional data center. “Fundamentally, it’s an infrastructure play,” said Arch Rao, founder and CEO of Span. “We’re unique …
