The Heatbit team at the Web Summit in Lisbon
Most heaters pass electricity through high-resistance wires to toast your toes. The Heatbit mini, however, trains large language models, creates AI for big businesses, or mines cryptocurrencies while it heats your home. In doing so, it pays its owners up to $28/month while in use.
“What we’re really doing is computing without energy,” says CEO Alex Busarov, whom I recently met at the Web Summit in Lisbon.
Bitcoin mining and AI training – which have grown a million-fold over the past seven years – together consume more energy than the entire UK, says Busarov. All of this is wasted as heat, which then often has to be cooled in a data or computing center, costing even more energy.
Heatbit’s solution: Run distributed AI computing across thousands of homes. Bundle this power to accomplish important tasks and use previously wasted heat as a desirable end product for cold people. The company says that every kilowatt hour used for computing in a traditional data center costs an additional 0.5 kWh to cool. Meanwhile, people heat their home or office with – for the sake of argument – another 1 kWh, which represents a total energy expenditure of 2.5 kWh between the data center and the house.
The alternative to auxiliary heating/AI trainer: simply run 1 kWh in a person’s home. Get heat, avoid cooling, and avoid the data center too. The net benefit is 60% lower energy consumption. And, if you want, green computing.
“We make the same energy work twice for you,” explains Busarov.
In British Columbia, Canada, where I live, we have cheap, clean hydroelectric power, so operating the Heatbit would be almost free. Even though it would cost me about $32 to run, it would net me $28 in computational costs. At average U.S. energy rates, it would cost $40 to operate while paying back the same $28.
The Heatbit Mini radiator, which leverages cryptography or performs AI calculation.
The unit itself uses 55 5-nanometer chips with 20 billion transistors to perform computing tasks and heat your home. It offers a HEPA filter for air purification as well as heating, can be controlled by an app or with a touchscreen on the device and comes with a money-back guarantee. It operates at less than 40 decibels of sound, quieter than a refrigerator, and Heatbit claims it will warm up to 400 square feet.
It’s not cheap either, ranging from $800 to $1,000.
At $28 per month, that’s a payback period of at least 28 months, and you probably won’t use it during the summer (although it can also filter your air). On the other hand, you’d be paying for electricity anyway, and for any other heating appliance, that’s probably money you’re flushing down the metaphorical toilet.
Heatbit started via a crypto-focused crowdfunding campaign and has sold over $1 million in units. The current unit is more focused on AI training.
One question: what will happen in summer, when no one wants to heat their house? Busarov plans to solve this problem by selling Heatbits globally, so that there are always cold people training the AI to warm up.
Another question for potential customers: will connectivity to tens of thousands of homes be a challenge? That remains to be seen.