US charging firm to run AI computers on spare EV charger power
Xeal says its US charging sites use less than 10% of their permitted power, and plans to fill the rest with AI computing pods.
US charging company Xeal plans to use the unused electrical capacity at its EV charging sites to run small AI data centres, DCD reports.
New York-based Xeal says it has installed chargers at more than 1,600 properties across 500-plus US cities over the past seven years, making it one of the five largest Level 2, or AC, charging operators in the country. Those sites have more than 200MW of permitted, grid-connected electrical capacity between them.
Xeal says charging sites are permitted for their maximum load but typically use less than 10% of it. Its new business, called Laitent, will use power orchestration software to send the remaining capacity to computer hardware installed on site, with EV charging keeping priority over its share of the supply.
The hardware comes in what Xeal calls Laitent Pods. Each takes up about one parking space, holds up to 48 Nvidia Hopper or Blackwell Ultra GPUs, runs at under 65 decibels and needs no water connection or backup generator. Xeal says a pod can be installed in hours.
The pods are aimed at AI inference, the work of running trained AI models to answer queries, rather than training them. Xeal says placing compute close to users cuts latency, and that it eventually plans to deploy more than 100,000 Nvidia GPUs.
“If you need inference compute today and can’t wait for a new data center to come online, Laitent can accelerate your timeline from years to months,” says Xeal co-founder and chief executive Nikhil Bharadwaj.
Property owners host the pods and earn income from them. The first will be installed at a JVM Realty property by the end of the year. Xeal has also signed Rafay Systems to manage the AI workloads and Spectrum Business for fibre connections, and says an unnamed inference provider has committed to up to 5MW of compute.
“For property owners, the combination of a new income stream with little-to-no upfront investment creates meaningful financial upside,” says JVM Realty chief operating officer Steve Boyack.
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