- The iLamp is a solar-powered street light that also serves as a low-power, off-grid AI data center.
- It aims to reduce AI’s massive electricity and water consumption by distributing calculations across city infrastructure.
- Conflow Power is already deploying iLamp agreements worth millions, including security technologies for thousands of Florida schools.
A British green tech company has built something that looks like a street light, but acts more like a climate-conscious brain. The iLamp, developed by Conflow Power Group, is a solar-powered lighting system that also serves as a distributed AI data center. But it doesn’t connect to the network.
It may seem modest, but the iLamp comes at a critical time. According to the International Energy Agency, artificial intelligence data centers already consume 415 terawatt hours of electricity per year. This figure is expected to more than double by 2030, to around 945 TWh, more than the total annual electricity consumption of many medium-sized countries. In this context, the idea of an autonomous solar pole managing both lighting and AI computing has obvious appeal.
The main idea is to take common street lights and turn them into a network of smart micro data centers powered by solar energy. Each iLamp works with a self-cleaning solar panel, capable of generating between 200 and 600 watts depending on local conditions and uses only 80 watts to operate, leaving more than enough surplus to power the integrated Nvidia Jetson AI processors, which sip a modest 15 watts each.
“While tech giants are racing to build nuclear power plants to feed their addiction to AI, we’ve built something smarter. Right now, to power AI, companies like OpenAI or Google Gemini need a huge building full of GPUs and have to pump huge amounts of electricity into it, as well as a huge supply of water for the cooling system. It’s inefficient and we need a smart solution,” Edward Fitzpatrick, director of Conflow Power. “There are streetlights everywhere in our cities. By replacing them with iLamps equipped with Nvidia Jetson processors, you create a huge distributed data center that is clean, uses little water and has low latency because the servers are close to the users. We are already in advanced negotiations with several large companies and governments around the world to make this a reality.”
AI floor lamps
AI providers pay to use the computing power built into each iLamp. This means that instead of facing a growing energy bill, municipalities and private operators can earn revenue from their lighting infrastructure.
Conflow Power has adopted a licensing-based business model. Territories are divided and licensed exclusively, allowing local partners to develop their own markets. Last year, Conflow sold the exclusive Florida license to iLamp Florida LLC for $45 million. Last month, that license was split again, this time in favor of iLamp Secure Inc., which paid $80 million for a 50-year contract to equip 4,400 Florida schools with security-enhanced iLamps. This unique deployment has an estimated addressable market value of $777 million.
These particular units are more than lightweight and computational: they include AI-based gunshot detection, license plate and facial recognition, fire and smoke early warnings, vehicle speed tracking, and private wireless connectivity. Conflow is also working to equip British and French rugby clubs with a new version of the iLamp designed for sports performance. These sticks are equipped with AI-powered tactical cameras and training-friendly lighting.
Of course, not everyone is going to pay for the smart lamp, no matter how green or smart it is. And there are questions to be answered about surveillance, especially as facial recognition and license plate scanning increasingly emerge as tools prone to abuse.
But what iLamp suggests is that we may not need to build our AI future from scratch. We may just have to renovate the parts of our cities that are already there and ready for more.
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