Heata bolts cloud servers onto home boilers so computing heat becomes free hot water

Heata, an English startup, prototyped its idea in a battered country workshop in Godalming, Surrey: a thermal conductor that carries heat from computer processors into a 90-liter water cylinder. The product is a cloud network of servers installed in people's homes, each bolted to a boiler, connected over household Wi-Fi to process workloads that companies pay Heata for. A unit transfers the equivalent of 4.8 kilowatt-hours of hot water a day — about the daily use of an average family — and saves homeowners an average of £250 a year, in a region where 13% of inhabitants struggle to afford heat.

The arrangement replaces fan cooling, which is expensive and energy-intensive, with a patented thermal bridge to the boiler shell, and replaces the giant data center with what cofounder Mike Paisley calls a diffuse data center: processing moves to wherever heat is needed. Each server avoids about one tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent per year. At 75% utilization a unit provides around 80% of an average UK household's hot water.

By August 2023 the Innovate UK-funded trial in Surrey had run for more than a year, with 80 units installed and 30 more slated by the end of October, and Heata had joined Innovate UK's Net Zero Cohort. Innovate UK's Mike Pitts called the solution "particularly elegant" — using electricity twice, for cloud computing and for domestic hot water.

Put the data center in homes: each boiler hosts a cloud server, so one unit of electricity is sold twice — cloud compute for companies, hot water for the home.

Cooling is a major cost of cloud computing; here the heat is not a cost to manage but the product delivered to the home.

Siting compute in homes puts processing capacity where heat demand already exists, so no new energy infrastructure is needed.

Homeowners have a concrete reason to sign up — about £250 a year of hot water — which recruits domestic space as data center space.

The workload broker keeps enterprise customers on a normal cloud relationship while the physical machines live in living rooms.

The cheapest cooling is someone's hot-water tank: route computation to where waste heat is already a cost, and the same kilowatt-hour gets paid for twice.

As of the August 2023 MIT Technology Review profile, the Surrey trial had 80 units running with 30 more planned within months, and Heata was part of Innovate UK's Net Zero Cohort. Homeowner James Heather's verdict: "We no longer need the energy for cooling the compute units, and we don't need the energy for heating our hot water either."