Everyone knows that computers get hot when they’re working hard — cooling data centers requires almost as much energy as powering them. But what if you could turn that excess heat into something useful, like heating the water in your home?
That’s what Superheat’s new water heater does. It’s a combined 50-gallon water heater and bitcoin mining rig, using the heat the computer produces by mining bitcoin to heat the water. The device uses about the same amount of energy as a standard electric water heater, but the company says customers should be able to offset those costs with the bitcoin their device mines.
While Superheat’s devices are designed for residential use in homes or apartments, the long-term goal is to help with rising data center costs. A company could pay residents to use a portion of their water heaters’ computing power instead of building a data center in the neighborhood. “Our ultimate goal is to use this for the cloud and AI inference,” Superheat Head of Operations Julie Xu told CNET’s Jon Reed at CES this week.
