By Ben Zientara
Publication Date: 2026-04-15 12:42:00
From pv magazine USA
Smart electrical panel manufacturer Span has announced a new collaboration with technology and semiconductor giant Nvidia to develop XFRA, a network of devices that convert unused electric capacity in homes and small businesses into a distributed compute cloud.
The network operates by placing XFRA Nodes at customer homes and businesses and coordinating them to serve data center workloads. According to a video posted on LinkedIn by Span CEO Arch Rao, each node contains Dell PowerEdge servers with 16 Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell GPUs, 4 AMD EPYC CPUs and 3 TB of RAM, connected to a 24-port gigabit switch.
The nodes are connected to a customer’s building through a Span smart service panel, which detects how much energy the customer is using at any given point and manages the nodes as always-on loads.
In a white paper about the XFRA project, the company says residential homes operate at an average of just 40% of their peak power capacity, which leaves “untapped” headroom that can be utilized by the XFRA nodes. The company’s solution will allow homes to utilize closer to 100% of their rated service from the utility.
For a home with 200 A service, 40% of the potential power draw represents 80 A, or 19.2 kW at 240 V.
A whole-home battery installed alongside the XFRA nodes will serve to safeguard compute workloads, buffer short-term demand spikes and respond to utility demand response events. During a power…
