Nvidia (NVDA) just found a gigawatt of compute hiding in your neighbor's garage

Sixteen Blackwell GPUs. Mounted on a wall. In a tract home in suburbia.

That's the partnership Nvidia, smart-panel startup Span, and homebuilder PulteGroup (PHM) recently unveiled — Nvidia GPUs powering the units, and PulteGroup testing the systems in a handful of communities.

The pitch: the average U.S. home runs at only ~40% of peak electrical capacity, so Span's panels harvest the headroom, the wall-mounted compute node runs AI inference workloads, and the homeowner gets discounted electricity and Wi-Fi in exchange.

A 100-node pilot is planned for Q3 2026, with a pipeline targeting gigawatt-scale deployment in 2027.

Zoom out from the deal itself for a second.

Nvidia closed its fiscal 2026 in late January with revenue up 65% to $216B and net income up 65% to $120B — extraordinary numbers at that scale, the kind most large-cap tech companies can't produce at any size. And the stock still trades at a forward P/E less than half of AMD's.

NVDA trades at less than half AMD's forward P/E

• NVDA: ~24x forward earnings

• AMD: ~54x forward earnings

Both as of early May 2026.

The Span deal won't move Nvidia's P&L on its own — a 100-home pilot is a rounding error against $216B in annual revenue. But it's a useful tell on why betting against this company keeps getting harder.

Nvidia is finding distribution in places nobody was modeling a year ago, including the side of a tract home in Phoenix.

Span's CEO framed the goal as "collapsing the speed-to-power gap" — routing around the multi-year permitting and interconnection queues that choke traditional data center builds. U.S. data center electricity use is projected to climb from ~4% of national consumption in 2024 to over 9% by 2030, and that's only achievable if new compute shows up where the grid already has slack.

The cleanest exposure to all of this is NVDA itself, and that long-term thesis holds well beyond this single deal.

The stocks below are secondary plays we're watching if the home data-center model actually scales.

Watchlist: secondary plays on a home data-center rollout

• PHM (PulteGroup) — Third-largest U.S. homebuilder, already installing Span's smart panels. First in line if pilot economics work.

• DELL — Each node is built on a Dell PowerEdge server. Direct beneficiary every time one ships.

• LEN / DHI — The most likely fast-followers if PulteGroup proves the model. Watch for partnership announcements.

• ETN (Eaton) — Smart electrical infrastructure sits in the path whether compute centralizes or decentralizes. Distributed compute still needs panels, switchgear, and battery integration at every node.

Bottom line: AI keeps showing up in unexpected corners of the economy. We'll keep flagging the pin action when it does.