The energy required for crypto mining is well known. Bitcoin uses around 127 terawatt-hours annually. Bitcoin would be the 32nd largest power user if it were a nation. Much of this energy is produced as heat, which data centers must cool. Wouldn’t it be amazing to use all this heat? The idea behind Hestiia is to install a miner on a radiator on your wall and utilize the extra heat from mining for money to heat your home.
Modern households may utilize the company’s eco-friendly home heater, which generates heat from recycled data center chips.
About 75% of heating is still fossil fuel. Governments worldwide are limiting fossil fuel heating and promoting electric heating. Heat pumps are considered the only choice. Their price is the issue. Installing them is challenging. The noise and ugly appearance are also issues. At CES 2024, Hestiia CEO and creator Antoine Cossart told Eltrys that they replaced the heater with a computer.
The system matches renewable energy supply with demand. The clever technology may pre-heat the house before the homeowner arrives, switch off energy-consuming appliances like ovens, and restart thereafter. The objective is to keep houses comfortable and stable on the grid.
Hestiia’s heaters use recycled ASIC chips from data centers upgrading to newer versions. These chips are revived on a bespoke board to provide heat for the residence. Conductive layers and heat pipes maximize heat transmission and warmth.
The heater’s front panel is made of recycled resin and polymers. Convection and radiant heating are both provided by the dual-core heating technology, and an app can control the temperature. As the temperature rises, more chips are providing heat.
Distributed data processing is possible with Hestiia’s revolutionary heating system. The heaters might become widespread computing centers by processing data for SETI or blockchain applications.
Data centers use a lot of power and waste heat, so Hestiia’s technique is sustainable.
“Next, as AI grows and consumes more electricity and data centers and pumps up more heat into the atmosphere, we want to offer distributed AI compute power,” Cossart adds. “We’d rather reuse the waste heat and do something smart with it than consider it waste.”
Several items are under beta testing at the firm. Hestiia will begin delivering next month and has presold 230 units, aiming to sell 1,000–2,000 units this year, mostly in France.
I’ve always thought blockchains were a lot of hot air, and it seems like a natural end stage of the technology to use it to make hot air, but at least this time it’s being utilized for good. Due to the constant requirement for compute power, heaters will remain significant even if blockchains lose popularity.
While this firm makes sense currently, processing power is rapidly accelerating, which is its greatest issue. Heater pumps in houses last 15-20 years; hence, Hestiia’s heaters may not be able to contribute to computation-heavy jobs in 15 years. Example: Can you name a 2009 machine that still meets AI computational needs?
Still, entrepreneurs’ new perspectives on computing and climate change are fascinating.
After obtaining €5 million a few years ago, the business is seeking €1 million in a bridge round.
