"Great chance that it is cost efficient to run your job on our servers. Our servers are distributed over homes, so you don’t have to pay for the overhead of a datacenter. This means that your cost-per-job is up to 55% lower and you compute sustainably, as we use the produced heat to heat homes."
Distributed over homes? As in "houses"? Your customer's data is stored at someone's (an employee's?) house?
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.
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.
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.