[shoyer]

It looks like they install (sell?) racks of computers as household "heaters". Scroll down to the "Win, win, win!" section on their homepage with a video.

This is a cute idea but I am skeptical that it makes sense from either an economic or environmental perspective. There are far more efficient ways to produce heat than electric heaters that run 24/7, and likewise cooling in data centers can be extremely efficient by making use of water, e.g., see https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/efficiency/internal...

Also, maintaining servers in people's homes must be quite expensive and there is limited capacity. It's hard to see that scaling.

advanderveer -- do you have some sort of white-paper that compares the alternatives?

Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not on Google Cloud.

[j-pb]

> There are far more efficient ways to produce heat than electric heaters that run 24/7.

Do you mean cheaper? Because generating heat always has 100% efficiency. The only difference is that if you go from burnable materials to heat directly you don't get the nice side effect of getting computation done, so burning stuff is actually less efficient.

[pkolaczk]

Technically you're right, but what you really want at home is not generating heat, but having more heat inside. These are not the same things. You can actually move some heat from outside to inside by using a heat pump (powered by electricity), commonly known as "air conditioner". Heat pumps can typically move 2x-6x more heat then they consume energy. So practically their heating or cooling efficiency is 2x-6x better than a resistance-based heater.

As for burning stuff - burning stuff is typically much cheaper, although it is actually the least efficient way of heating, in terms of a ratio between the usable heat you get and the total chemical energy converted to heat.