UK Firm Plans Distributed AI Data Centre Using 50,000 Solar-Powered Lampposts
Warwickshire-based Conflow Power Group Limited (CPG) has signed a formal agreement with a Nigerian state to deploy 50,000 solar-powered smart lampposts (iLamps), networking them together to form a “revenue-generating distributed AI data centre.”
Technical Approach
Each iLamp features a cylindrical solar panel at the top that powers a low-energy onboard computer. The computer runs an Nvidia AI chip drawing just 15 watts of power — enough for lighter AI inference tasks.
“Nvidia is the company that’s created a small enough chip, powered with 15 watts of power, so it can be powered by solar, and we can put that inside a street light,” CPG chairman Edward Fitzpatrick told BBC’s Tech Life programme.
The company’s vision is that at scale, a network of thousands of iLamps would collectively deliver the processing power of a data centre, with the environmental advantage of not drawing energy from the grid.
Use Cases
In Nigeria, each lamppost will be equipped with AI cameras capable of:
- Detecting parking violations
- Identifying speeding vehicles
- Monitoring seatbelt compliance
iLamps with cameras are already operational in a Warwick Hospital car park, providing “CCTV monitoring and number plate recognition.” Fitzpatrick also revealed the lights could potentially be used for facial recognition to spot wanted or missing people, though no such deployment exists yet.
Security Design
Data centre industry veteran Prof Ian Bitterlin raised concerns about the physical security of the streetlights.
Fitzpatrick acknowledged the risk: “If people realise that there’s a $2,000 unit inside there they might try and steal it.” However, the posts are designed so that the chip would be “fried” if forcibly removed.
Expert Skepticism
Some experts remain cautious about the scheme’s practical effectiveness.
John Booth, Managing Director of consultancy Carbon3IT Ltd and a member of BCS the Chartered Institute for IT, suggested the iLamps could serve as “a relatively low-cost solution that can be used for small AI applications in conjunction with other larger sites.”
Bitterlin, however, argued that AI streetlighting cannot replace the massive data centres used to train leading large language models — primarily because the communication distance and latency between posts would be too great.
Context
AI energy consumption has become a major global concern. Some estimates suggest AI’s electricity usage is approaching the entire UK’s power consumption. CPG’s solar lamppost concept offers an alternative distributed, renewable-energy-driven approach to scaling AI compute.
Fitzpatrick even envisions a public interaction feature: “You could walk past the streetlight, put your two fingers up like a victory sign and that could be voting for something. That could be a poll which you could put out onto social media.”
The company is currently in “final stage negotiations” with state schools and local authorities in Florida to deploy all these features.
Source: BBC News