We built a solar data center on a farm
(it's very small)
I spent the past week on a farm in California building a proof of concept solar data center.
It is internet connected and runs 24/7, but is completely off grid.
There are no wires connecting it to the outside world, thanks to batteries and Starlink.
How it started
In February I put out a tweet asking if anyone wanted to build a proof-of-concept solar data center.
Luckily, the internet is a reality printer. You input an idea, and it outputs talented people and real life stuff.
An insane group of people responded. This project is the collective work of Guthrie, Bjorn, Ami, Ivy, Andy, Luke, Nick, Harrison, Parker, Graham, Nate and many others.
Accruing parts
A week before the build, we joined a video call and figured out how to build this. We were lucky to have Bjorn and Luke who spent years at Tesla building battery & solar systems!
We then borrowed a lot of things and drove them to a field. We inherited 20 excess solar panels from a commercial installation, borrowed two GPUs & workstations, three battery systems, Starlink, and the rest.
Compute tent
We filled a grow-tent with battery storage, a server, a box fan, industrial blower, air filtration, and a lot of silica gel. This was enough to dissipate 700W of heat.
Side note: I work in energy and I am still shocked by how powerful a solar panel is. I look at the panels on the ground and they look so silly. They are so innocuous, just sitting there, la la la la. Nothing is moving. Then I look over at the inverter and they are delivering many kilowatts of power. Most of time we only needed six panels.
Use our compute!
This week we have an RTX4090 fitted. We are hosting:
A notebook server so that anyone can use it like Collab
Llama & Deepseek
Docker job submission
We are currently setting up some protein synthesis work. Let me know if you have jobs that need compute before the end of June!
Lastly
Why did we do this? Solar+batteries+gas backup is a quick, clean and cheap solution for powering data centers. You can build power fast without waiting to connect to the power grid. If you are interested in the economics of off-grid solar datacenters, check out the interactive cost calculator that I made with the offgridai.us team.
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Sourcing parts for this relied on immense generosity from many people. Particular thanks to Guthrie (conjuror extraordinaire), Grant, Kaylee, Nick and Harrison (PV panels), Andy and Mit (GPU), Harrison and Graham (batteries).
So cool!!
So cool… next year it’d be awesome to use a hydropower pump storage system as the battery