Daylight, a decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN) project focused on creating a distributed solar grid, has raised $75 million to expand its network of solar coverage in the United States.
Daylight offers solar as a subscription-based service to customers, eliminating the high upfront cost of purchasing and installing panels and batteries, which can cost consumers more than $30,000. The project’s testnet will be launched in 2024.
The grid generates revenue through subscription-based energy service and by feeding excess energy into the power grid. Customers share in the revenue by earning “Sun Points” for contributing to the decentralized solar network, with plans to introduce a token in the future.
The funding round includes venture capital firms Framework Ventures, a16z Crypto, Lerer Hippeau, M13, Room40 Ventures, EV3, and Turtle Hill Capital, according to an announcement from Daylight.
DePINs showcase how decentralized technology can have real-world use cases by aligning customer and business incentives to create a robust, community-owned infrastructure that parallels the centralized legacy system.
The current power grid cannot handle the needs of high-performance computing
AI data centers and other high-performance computing facilities, such as cryptocurrency miners, require significant energy inputs, which puts pressure on the power grid.
Increased demand from the technology sector could raise prices for consumers. Wholesale power prices near data centers have risen a whopping 267% since 2020, according to Bloomberg.
AI training and centralized data centers that support AI could lead to a global energy crisis, Greg Ossori, founder of the Akash Network, an open source marketplace where users can save and buy computing power, told Cointelegraph.
The solution to this is to decentralize the data center business by pulling computing power from distributed sources, including consumer PCs equipped with graphics cards and enterprises using industrial-grade computer processors.
“Once we figure out the incentives, this will take off like it did in mining,” he told Cointelegraph in September.
Tech giants like Google, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft are already exploring alternative energy sources to power their AI data centers and reduce reliance on the electrical grid.
Amazon signed a deal with Talen Energy in June for 1,920 megawatts of nuclear power for AI data centers and service facilities in Pennsylvania.
