The network under your nose

Take the average American household’s energy consumption and multiply it by 17 million. That’s how much energy cloud computing consumed in 2018 alone. And the number is only growing, driven by the rollout of 5G networks and the relentless expansion of the Internet of Things.

Yet the cloud industry’s response to this growing demand has been remarkably one-dimensional: build bigger server farms. More warehouses, more racks, more cooling systems, more energy. It’s an approach that scales linearly with cost and environmental impact, and it simply isn’t sustainable.

The hardware already exists#

Edge takes a fundamentally different approach. Instead of building new infrastructure from the ground up, we reuse the hardware that’s all around us. Think about a set-top box. It’s plugged in 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, but it’s only actively used for a few hours. Now imagine joining millions of these devices together into a single, coordinated network. The result is something incredibly powerful.

Set-top boxes are only the start. Laptops, gaming consoles, desktop PCs and even smartphones all have processing power, memory, and storage that goes unused for the vast majority of the day. That’s capacity that could be put to work.

Massive capacity going spare#

We ran a community survey and found that the average disk space usage across our network was just 52.56%. That means nearly half of all available storage is sitting idle: massive capacity going completely spare. Scale that up across millions of devices worldwide and you begin to see the true potential of edge computing.

This isn’t theoretical. The spare capacity exists right now, in devices people already own, in homes and offices on every continent. It just needs to be connected and coordinated.

The biggest beneficiary: the planet#

The biggest beneficiary of this approach isn’t any single company or user. It’s the planet. When we reuse devices that have already been manufactured, we eliminate the enormous energy and material cost of building new server farms. There are no new factories to run, no new warehouses to cool, no new hardware to produce and eventually discard.

And because data is stored closer to where it’s actually consumed, less energy is needed to transfer it across the globe. Shorter distances mean fewer network hops, lower latency, and significantly reduced energy consumption. The internet becomes faster, cheaper and genuinely greener.