Valuetainment - May 07, 2026


＂Your Home Is AI Ready＂ - Why Nvidia Wants To Turn Your House Into An AI Data Center


Episode Stats


Length

13 minutes

Words per minute

206.81435

Word count

2,863

Sentence count

182


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 Let me tell you what NVIDIA and the Pulte Group, which we had on the podcast here before,
00:00:04.360 he's great at what he does, but the Pulte Group and NVIDIA had a conversation,
00:00:09.540 and apparently they're starting a startup.
00:00:11.500 They're helping the startup put many data centers on homes.
00:00:15.360 So let me say this one more time.
00:00:16.840 So imagine you have a house, and you're buying a house,
00:00:19.440 and NVIDIA and Pulte Group are saying,
00:00:21.040 hey, let us build a small data center on top of your house.
00:00:23.920 Wait, what? Yes. Is this real? Apparently it is.
00:00:27.280 Span, a California-based startup, has developed a small fractional data center, or no, it's called the XFRA Units.
00:00:33.720 The idea is to take advantage of unused electrical capacity on local grids, which the Span smart panels can pinpoint.
00:00:40.260 NVIDIA GPUs are powering the units, and the Pulte Group is testing the system in a handful of communities.
00:00:48.180 Tom, your thoughts on this story?
00:00:49.700 Well, you know, what's really interesting is, you know, you started with homes, and as we started getting things,
00:00:55.760 It's like, I'll say something, low-voltage wiring.
00:00:58.460 What is low-voltage wiring?
00:00:59.500 I don't understand that.
00:01:00.540 Guess what?
00:01:01.020 That was fiber and stuff that were in your walls.
00:01:03.880 So suddenly, Pulte Group and others were adding that to your home,
00:01:07.180 so you could do it for alarms.
00:01:08.720 They were pre-wiring by windows and things like this,
00:01:11.360 so that when you called ADP and have some in there, it's done.
00:01:14.480 So home building has tried to follow the waves of services
00:01:19.220 that people want to put into homes.
00:01:21.320 You don't find coax going room-to-room anymore
00:01:24.080 because Wi-Fi powers the whole place,
00:01:26.140 you find things coming up to like a closet
00:01:28.280 where everything can be secured in there.
00:01:29.980 And what I think what they're doing here
00:01:32.100 is they are making it possible
00:01:36.020 to put those nodes up right on the house.
00:01:38.740 And now you say to your house,
00:01:39.900 hey, your house is AI ready
00:01:41.120 if you're going to have a small LMS
00:01:44.140 or you're going to have services
00:01:45.340 or maybe you're working from home
00:01:47.540 or you have a home office.
00:01:48.860 You're now going to have all this available to you
00:01:51.040 and we're testing this
00:01:52.460 and we're also testing the energy part of it.
00:01:55.480 So I think it's great.
00:01:57.120 I think it's Pulte riding the wave and trying to stay in front of the kind of things
00:02:01.400 that people are going to want on their new house.
00:02:04.740 It's like when you got into Microsoft, it never worked very well.
00:02:09.480 Microsoft will hate that I said that.
00:02:11.060 But you remember when Microsoft first put their stuff in the dashboard?
00:02:13.800 Was it Ford or G? I think it was Ford.
00:02:16.140 Microsoft put the thing in the dashboard, and it didn't really work well.
00:02:18.880 And then later, you know, CarPlay on Apple, as long as CarPlay could work on your dashboard.
00:02:25.080 It was great because you had CarPlay on your phone and whatever you had on your phone was suddenly on your dashboard.
00:02:29.420 It was the same thing, Pat, as when the automakers made it easy for us to drop our phone into the center console where there was an inductive charger there.
00:02:37.760 You didn't even need a cable and it could talk to your car.
00:02:40.500 This is Pulte doing the same thing, riding Tomorrow's Wave to give you what you want in your house.
00:02:45.140 So you buy a new house, and then you have to say, wow, now I've got to spend $10,000 wiring and doing all this stuff.
00:02:50.440 Nope, you can buy it, and thanks to NVIDIA, it's right here.
00:02:53.440 Jeff?
00:02:53.920 Yeah, I think, I mean, there's a couple of things here.
00:02:56.900 One is electricity, trying to find spare electricity and capacity rather than having to build new capacity, which is expensive, and it's leading to all sorts of problems.
00:03:04.140 So they're saying, look, there's spare energy in people's houses.
00:03:06.580 Let's take advantage of it.
00:03:08.140 But the bigger idea here, looking at the future, I mean, we're talking about AI, data centers, and everything else.
00:03:13.560 I forget who it was, just recently said there's going to be a market for compute.
00:03:19.640 Rob, was it Goldman Sachs?
00:03:23.360 There's going to be a market for computing power and computing,
00:03:26.800 which is a far-reaching idea, envisioning what the future looks like.
00:03:34.180 Larry Fink.
00:03:34.700 Yeah, that's it.
00:03:35.740 Okay, BlackRock.
00:03:38.160 So a market for compute.
00:03:40.420 And in order to achieve a market for compute, you're going to need a ton of capacity.
00:03:44.040 You're going to need a ton of a lot of players.
00:03:45.260 And so they're going to wire everybody in.
00:03:46.940 And so you have computing capacity all over the system.
00:03:49.640 To the average person, what does this mean?
00:03:50.980 So the undergoing and unprecedented explosive growth plays driven almost entirely by an
00:03:55.400 set of demand for AI training and reference.
00:03:57.800 What does this mean to the average person?
00:03:59.180 Well, I can sum it up quickly.
00:04:01.840 Airbnb allows me to rent out a room in my house overnight to someone as long as I can
00:04:05.960 trust that it's not a crazy person.
00:04:08.000 Uber allows me to use my car to drive other people around.
00:04:12.240 What if I could Airbnb certain computing power or energy that was at my house?
00:04:18.140 That the part that I was not doing, I just set it up Airbnb and I let it go out to a market and then I get paid for that excess that gets used by someone.
00:04:26.100 Yeah, or Amazon says, look, I have a service that requires a lot of computation power and it's up to me to find out where this computing power would be all throughout the system.
00:04:33.720 Then you are engineering essentially tons of efficiencies.
00:04:37.320 Because Amazon can be as a centerpiece of the computing market
00:04:41.260 and everybody competing with Amazon.
00:04:42.700 Could I borrow your CPU while you sleep?
00:04:44.480 Or I'm going to buy it from you.
00:04:45.320 I'm going to rent it from you.
00:04:46.520 So if you have it already installed in your home,
00:04:48.320 you're actually making money off of the grid.
00:04:50.440 Yeah, so first things first, Pulte Group,
00:04:52.800 worry about building houses before you start doing all the complicated stuff
00:04:55.520 because we have $10 million short that we're not up to speed with.
00:04:59.320 So want to hear about that before we start building AI data centers
00:05:02.360 on top of houses.
00:05:03.640 But when it comes to the shortage in computing power,
00:05:06.520 It makes me think of the shale boom and how bad of a situation we were in before we learned how to frack for oil.
00:05:12.160 Because, you know, we were getting up to like $5 for gas around that time, right?
00:05:17.380 Like $100 a barrel for oil.
00:05:19.340 And the shale boom really saved us in a huge way.
00:05:22.420 Like America became the biggest producer of oil because of that.
00:05:25.420 So, I mean, people really overlooked that in terms of like energy demand and like how vulnerable the situation we were in, how expensive energy was at that time.
00:05:32.140 So just a guess, just a prediction, but I don't think we're doing this in the optimal way.
00:05:37.820 I think it's like a really expensive, messy way that we're looking for in building computing power right now.
00:05:43.900 So I think there's going to be some type of innovation that makes it easier, cheaper, and more abundant because it's not sustainable this way.
00:05:51.500 They're trying to do it right now.
00:05:52.980 I disagree, actually.
00:05:54.440 Can I disagree with you?
00:05:55.480 You know I respect you, but I'm going to disagree here.
00:05:57.560 Please.
00:05:57.880 What do people do with solar?
00:05:59.240 In certain places in America, you can have a net meter that if you're at work, let's say it's you, and let's say you own a small house that maybe someone like J.P. Morgan bought you or something.
00:06:10.120 And so you take that small house, and you have some solar grid, and you go to work.
00:06:14.340 And during the day, it's making more energy than you use, and you have a Tesla battery power wall in your garage.
00:06:22.040 It gets filled up.
00:06:23.060 But then the excess, what does it do?
00:06:24.620 It goes out to the grid.
00:06:25.600 And if you're in certain jurisdictions, you could have what's called a net meter where you're actually getting paid for the little kilowatts that you're putting to the grid because you're at work.
00:06:34.460 Your air conditioning is turned up to 80 degrees on your house.
00:06:37.280 No one's home.
00:06:38.080 And yet your roof is putting energy into the grid and you're getting paid for it.
00:06:42.060 How is this any different?
00:06:43.480 I mean, yeah, I used to sell solar.
00:06:45.300 So, I mean, the government had to subsidize it for a reason because, you know, it gave you a 30 percent tax credit because it's not really that efficient when you boil it down, especially if you're in certain areas.
00:06:52.840 Like if you have a southern facing roof and have sunlight most of the day, then it's good.
00:06:56.020 But if you're in the north and it's not efficient, if you're in a place where there's not sunlight for more than a couple hours a day, it's not efficient.
00:07:02.160 So, I mean, it could work, but I don't think the cost versus benefit is quite there yet.
00:07:07.740 Like, you know, like shelling out this amount of money just for computing power, that's going to be exponential in demand.
00:07:12.360 Brandon, Brandon, there's two major constraints here.
00:07:14.680 One is hardware, which I mean, the more efficient model is to build these gigantic data centers.
00:07:18.820 But the other is energy.
00:07:19.980 What they're basically saying is we're running up against hard limits on energy.
00:07:23.860 So we've got to find it somewhere.
00:07:25.480 What they're saying is there's spare energy in people's houses,
00:07:27.980 so let's unlock that untapped potential and use that to help cheapen the cost.
00:07:32.260 You'd be open to it if they came to you?
00:07:33.880 Absolutely.
00:07:34.380 You would be as well, Tom?
00:07:35.320 Yes, I would.
00:07:35.980 Okay.
00:07:36.380 Rob, would you be open to it?
00:07:39.860 I'd have to look more into the cost of it,
00:07:41.780 but if it's not going to cost me anything, it's going to be inside of my own.
00:07:44.260 They're going to give you free internet.
00:07:45.500 They're going to give you your electricity prices are going to go down,
00:07:48.960 and they're just going to be using some of the power.
00:07:50.880 Yeah, but it feels like an invasion of my privacy still.
00:07:53.080 What did the poll say?
00:07:54.100 You ran a poll.
00:07:54.740 What did the audience say with the poll?
00:07:56.020 75% said no.
00:07:57.860 What was the question?
00:07:58.960 Can you pull up the question?
00:07:59.940 Would you allow NVIDIA to install a mini data center inside of your home?
00:08:03.880 25% yes, 75%.
00:08:05.580 I'm interested to see why they said no.
00:08:07.660 Yeah.
00:08:08.140 Can you put in the comment section, audience, if you could,
00:08:11.320 why did you say no?
00:08:12.300 Why wouldn't you do it?
00:08:13.480 Do you think about it as they're invading your privacy?
00:08:16.480 I think it's probably privacy slash surveillance.
00:08:19.620 You know, one man's privacy becomes a government surveillance, right?
00:08:23.020 And Brandon, you know, you think entrepreneurially.
00:08:26.520 You work with clients that are entrepreneurs.
00:08:28.340 And I kind of feel like you were like, wow, I don't know if this will ever work.
00:08:31.480 It won't work in the north and stuff.
00:08:34.120 I think where do we start innovation?
00:08:37.280 We have a power crisis.
00:08:38.560 I think this is kind of a good way to start that, don't you think?
00:08:41.100 I do.
00:08:41.460 I just get frustrated when it comes to energy because I feel like energy has been thwarted by the powers that be.
00:08:48.500 Things like where Elon Musk says, yeah, we just need 100 by 100 miles in the desert somewhere that there's sun all day,
00:08:53.220 and we'd have enough energy to power the entire country.
00:08:55.180 Oh, can you imagine if we had nuclear plants?
00:08:56.960 Right, that too.
00:08:57.600 Can you imagine that?
00:08:57.880 Those have been thwarted by lobbyists for the last 30 years.
00:08:59.980 I get frustrated when it comes to energy because it has been thwarted by whether it's big oil or the solar companies or the clean energy companies.
00:09:08.680 I don't know exactly why. I could imagine why, because if you control the energy, you control the society.
00:09:13.740 But that's why I don't love this particular idea, because I don't think it's the best way to do it.
00:09:20.500 I think there's a lot better ways to have infinite energy that we've thwarted over the years.
00:09:24.480 Yeah, I mean, if you look at some of the comments, AI, mass surveillance, some of it is health.
00:09:29.040 Home radiation.
00:09:29.540 Some of it is radiation. Yeah, these are valid issues. Health privacy, privacy, privacy.
00:09:33.880 Okay, great.
00:09:35.200 Great.
00:09:35.740 Maybe they're going to have to find a way to overcome this.
00:09:37.620 And if it becomes a norm and all of a sudden people start saying, hey, man, it's not even electricity.
00:09:41.800 It's not even this.
00:09:42.740 They actually send me a $580 check every month.
00:09:45.060 What?
00:09:45.640 Yeah.
00:09:46.020 They actually send me $300.
00:09:47.240 This could turn into a very different era.
00:09:50.400 Like, you know, the whole UBI thing?
00:09:51.820 Companies can have a form of UBI.
00:09:54.020 Absolutely.
00:09:54.600 Think about companies start having a form of UBI.
00:09:57.780 And one of the bigger reasons why Binance blew up is because they decided to say, we're going to do free.
00:10:03.600 Everybody else was charging fears.
00:10:04.880 They're like, no, we'll do it for free.
00:10:05.860 And that put out a lot of people out of business.
00:10:07.440 So there's going to be some people creatively that may come up with ideas that others are not thinking about.
00:10:11.980 Those of you guys that did the survey, we originally thought, because it's a lot of questions.
00:10:17.200 It was 27 of them.
00:10:19.060 We said, we're going to give a $25 gift card.
00:10:21.120 So we sat with finance and we said, guys, it's not like it's going to be that many anyways.
00:10:25.460 We said, let's put a budget of $25,000 to $50,000 for these $25 gift cards.
00:10:30.560 Well, the report comes out this morning from our digital marketing team.
00:10:36.080 11,976 of you did the survey, which is going to cost us $290-some-thousand-dollars for this gift card.
00:10:47.980 And a lot of you guys were tweeting saying, am I going to get the gift card?
00:10:50.840 If you completed the survey, you check your email today at 9 o'clock.
00:10:55.760 They started sending all the gift cards from Shopify to go to vtmerch.com.
00:11:00.560 And so check your email.
00:11:02.020 If it hasn't, just remember, it's 12,000 people.
00:11:05.940 So all of a sudden, it was put in the system.
00:11:08.540 You're probably going to, if you haven't already gotten it, if you check your mail, you will check your email.
00:11:13.980 You will in the next 15, 30 minutes, one hour.
00:11:17.580 But go to vtmerge.com.
00:11:19.380 That $25 is a straight-up gift card.
00:11:21.600 Buy whatever you want.
00:11:22.340 We have a lot of good things that people don't look at.
00:11:24.820 There's some unique accessories that we have you can go look into.
00:11:27.960 Yesterday, we had an event at our cigar lounge.
00:11:29.800 We have this Valuetainment cigar set with cutters, lighters.
00:11:34.060 There's so many great gifts that you can give somebody,
00:11:37.000 but you have your $25 gift card to use.
00:11:40.340 And by the way, for those of you guys that are watching,
00:11:42.220 saying it is so revealing, the report that came back.
00:11:46.620 FYI, just so everybody knows, nobody knows what the results were.
00:11:50.180 Tom doesn't even know the results.
00:11:51.440 It's driving him insane.
00:11:52.580 But I get teased a lot.
00:11:54.000 Yeah.
00:11:54.620 Brandon this morning is like, come on, tell me, where am I?
00:11:57.400 And him and Humberto are getting to him.
00:11:58.760 Umberto's holding people hostage.
00:12:00.160 I don't like what he's doing, but he loves it.
00:12:02.180 He loves this kind of stuff.
00:12:03.240 If you want to see what the report results were,
00:12:06.180 we may make a one-pager, two-pager to kind of share with the audience.
00:12:10.200 If you text the word PBD to 310-340-1132,
00:12:15.420 again, text the word PBD to 310-340-1132,
00:12:20.300 that report will be sent out to the audience.
00:12:23.160 Our YouTube guy called and says,
00:12:24.840 wait you guys did a survey on your audience to ask what they didn't like and did like yes we did
00:12:30.080 nobody does this and you gave away $25 gift card how many people you spent $300,000 you said well
00:12:36.560 we weren't expecting $300,000 but it's already too late so there you have it so everybody that
00:12:41.060 completed it I want to say thank you on behalf of the team this is great intel for us on finding
00:12:45.960 ways to improve the product that we have here and without your feedback we're going to read
00:12:50.620 every single one of the pieces of feedback and some of you guys may even get a call from us so
00:12:55.340 again text pbd to 310-340-1132 we may send a video a report to you guys specifically in a text once
00:13:02.680 we have that report and some people are not going to like it but it is what it is the report was
00:13:09.100 very good for all of us if you enjoyed this video you want to watch more videos like this click here
00:13:12.900 and if you want to watch the entire podcast click here
00:13:20.620 Thank you.