You can put a data center at your house—but who really pays?

Nvidia has put its name behind a fledgling effort to put mini-data centers beside people’s homes in boxes that look like HVAC units. It’s a “power” play, considering that the main bottleneck to building out more data center capacity is not money or chips, but rather retrofitting the electrical grid to supply the power. The idea , put forward by a California smart utility box company called Span, is to put the GPUs where the power has already been allocated—at the home.