- iLamp is a solar-powered street light that acts as a low-energy off-grid AI data center
- It aims to reduce AI’s massive electricity and water consumption by distributing computations across city infrastructure
- Conflow Power is already rolling out iLamp deals worth millions, including safety technology to thousands of Florida schools
A British greentech company has built something that looks like a street light, but functions more like a climate-aware brain. iLamp, developed by Conflow Power Group, is a solar-powered lighting system that acts as a distributed AI data center. But it does not connect to the network.
It may seem modest, but iLamp arrives at a critical time. According to the International Energy Agency, artificial intelligence data centers already use 415 terawatt-hours of electricity annually. That number is expected to more than double by 2030 to around 945 TWh, more than the combined annual electricity consumption of many medium-sized countries. Against this background, the idea of a self-sufficient solar bar that handles both lighting and AI computing has obvious appeal.
The core idea is to take ordinary street lights and turn them into a network of intelligent, solar-powered micro data centers. Each iLamp runs on a self-cleaning solar panel capable of generating between 200 and 600 watts depending on local conditions and uses just 80 watts to operate, leaving more than enough left over to power onboard Nvidia Jetson AI processors, which each sip a modest 15 watts.
“While tech giants are scrambling to build nuclear power plants to feed their AI addiction, we’ve built something smarter. Right now, to power AI, people like OpenAI or Google Gemini need a huge building full of GPUs, and they need to pump huge amounts of electricity into it, along with a huge water supply for the cooling system. This is a smart, Power solution, and we need Conpatrick’s solution. “There are street lights all over our towns and cities. By replacing them with iLamps equipped with Nvidia Jetson processors, you create a huge distributed data center that is clean, non-water hungry and low latency because the servers are close to the users. We are already in advanced negotiations with several major corporations and world governments to make this a reality.”
AI street lights
AI providers pay to use the computing power embedded in each iLamp. This means that instead of facing a rising energy bill, municipalities and private operators can make money from their lighting infrastructure.
Conflow Power has adopted a license-based business model. Territories are divided and out-licensed exclusively, leaving 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 shared again, this time to iLamp Secure Inc., which paid $80 million for a 50-year deal to equip 4,400 Florida schools with security-enhanced iLamps. The single deployment has an estimated addressable market value of $777 million.
These special devices are more than just light and computer: they include AI-enabled gunshot detection, license plate and facial recognition, early fire and smoke alarms, 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 athletic performance. These bars 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 are increasingly proving to be tools prone to abuse.
But what the iLamp suggests is that we may not need to build our AI future from scratch. We might just have to retrofit the parts of our cities that are already there and ready to do more.
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