I'm genuinely confused as to who they think this would appeal to from a consumer (not homeowner) standpoint.
Modern Datacenters are basically fortresses that require different levels of security clearance to even step foot in. Even then, to get access to certain areas you need Federal Secret or Top Secret clearance. There's all kinds of data privacy laws and standards that need to be met. HIPAA, NIST, FIPS, etc.
If I'm developing an LLM or Agentic workloads and pumping TB's of business sensitive data through it, there's no way in hell I want that anywhere near one of these things. Even if the cost savings are there, I'd much rather put that into any hyperscaler who, to nobody's surprise, are all also in business with Nvidia.
Speaking of Nvidia, the whitepaper for this says these will be outfitted with RTX6000 Blackwell GPU's. Nvidia basically can control global supply chain (that's a whole other conversation) and the Blackwell generation is already a couple of years old; meaning these units will be obsolete in the not too distant future and require refreshes or upgrades to meet demand.
Even if the Blackwell generation holds its place as leading edge for a while, the failure rate of GPU's is HIGH; so expect someone constantly in your yard to service these, assuming they have the manpower to do so.
The servers for these are liquid cooled as well and, after my initial passthrough, I haven't seen anything to address the water consumption needed for that. This could be a closed loop system, but that's incredibly unlikely given the size and number of GPU's involved.
In short, I think this is a half-baked idea and the byproduct of a gold rush mentality. Even if Span gets enough people to sign up, I don't think the consumer market will be on board with it.
Modern Datacenters are basically fortresses that require different levels of security clearance to even step foot in. Even then, to get access to certain areas you need Federal Secret or Top Secret clearance. There's all kinds of data privacy laws and standards that need to be met. HIPAA, NIST, FIPS, etc.
If I'm developing an LLM or Agentic workloads and pumping TB's of business sensitive data through it, there's no way in hell I want that anywhere near one of these things. Even if the cost savings are there, I'd much rather put that into any hyperscaler who, to nobody's surprise, are all also in business with Nvidia.
Speaking of Nvidia, the whitepaper for this says these will be outfitted with RTX6000 Blackwell GPU's. Nvidia basically can control global supply chain (that's a whole other conversation) and the Blackwell generation is already a couple of years old; meaning these units will be obsolete in the not too distant future and require refreshes or upgrades to meet demand.
Even if the Blackwell generation holds its place as leading edge for a while, the failure rate of GPU's is HIGH; so expect someone constantly in your yard to service these, assuming they have the manpower to do so.
The servers for these are liquid cooled as well and, after my initial passthrough, I haven't seen anything to address the water consumption needed for that. This could be a closed loop system, but that's incredibly unlikely given the size and number of GPU's involved.
In short, I think this is a half-baked idea and the byproduct of a gold rush mentality. Even if Span gets enough people to sign up, I don't think the consumer market will be on board with it.