A Wonderful Future for Computers

A quick glance at the past, present and future of computing, with a holistic view.

In the first half of the 20th century, immense leaps in applied mathematics and electronics paved the way to the computer rooms allowing rockets to launch into outer space and come back.

Over the next decades, processors made exponential gains in speed and density, allowing smartphones of today to have more computing power than a million dollar mainframe of the early 2000s.

But all this computing power is wasted in our pockets. Spiking when an on-device AI model enhances the few pictures we take per week.

At first, computing power was scarce, and was used only with clear intent to generate maximal value. Now, most computing power is either left unused or wasted on what can be considered at best low value, at worst societal destructive work such as scrolling feeds and ads.

A computer, just like a knife or a stick, is a tool we can exert our will upon to enhance our ability to impact the world around us.

It is not the computer's fault that our society is wasting its amazing potential on capitalist first endeavors.

A nagging feeling

At NationTech, we are working hard on providing a way to use that great invention to really make the world a better place.

To achieve that, we cannot cut corners, we cannot create better by destroying good.

We've been seeing an exponential increase in compute density, yes, and that is the natural fruit of our beautiful society putting its best intentions at discovering new ways and new tools.

But we've also seen an incredible amount of energy, natural resources and land beign taken by immense datacenters, creating obvious and major problems such as soft water shortages, which are only going to get worse as we let the AI and Cloud Computing bubble grow.

Although we don't pretend we can predict precisely when problems become irreversible (we can only hope we're wrong), we see an obviously better approach.

As I am sure many of you readers will have had this feeling, when you're onto a _correct_ solution, when you've touched on the right way to fix a problem, one can just feel it.

And this is the feeling that's been growing on us for the past 5 years.

A beautifully integrated design

Over decades spent deploying computing platforms, we built first hand experience with both the ability of an individual or a small business to deploy computing, as well as the high end requirements of the most demanding workloads.

This gave us unique insight into how we can meet both realities. Thus came the Micro Data Center idea. This is not entirely new of course. We're not the first ones to have servers in closets (wink homelab community) or very involved basement setups with a pool heating system (wink Linus Tech Tips).

Nor are we the first to do decentralized computing. There are literally hundreds of startups trying to build upon the success of the blockchain design to try to create a more general purpose computing grid.

But we have not come across yet a design that integrates all those key elements :

Maximize the value of our energy

Optimizing energy usage end-to-end is the ultimate goal. This makes everything more affordable.

We work on deploying computers in a way that does not increase the global, natural energy consumption requirements of our society.

When a building needs to be heated, using a baseboard heater is just as efficient as a computer, and it has no other use. The energy required to heat a single home, is roughly the same amount as is required by an average household to host all of their computing workloads, from their day job to their time off.

We can heat homes and offices, greenhouses, hot water, pools, saunas, and many more things.

Our vision is to provide people with a smart computing cluster that will heat their home in winter, and help manage their greenhouse by heating it, monitoring it, hosting good AI models to assist them in everyday tasks.

This is the wonderful aspect of that design : it integrates so well and fulfills the promises of computer to actually help us thrive as humans, families, neighbors and peoples.

Build fully open-source

This is the only way to allow our technology to grow quickly, this greatly reduces the adoption barrier for any person or organization and paves the way to an organically, exponentially growing ecosystem surrounding computing done right.

Build upon proven technology

Every engineer knows that developing a new feature is split in 80/20 ratios. The first 80% of the functionality requires 20% of the effort. And only the most robust and mature technologies ever get to the required maturity to be relied upon at a large scale and in varying environments. We chose our tech stack using a very similar grid to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation to ensure that our users have all the features they need, and our operations team is not overwhelmed by immature technology bugs and shortcomings.

Next-gen automation

With the aim of deploying tens of thousands of sites across the globe, comes extreme automation and redundancy requirements. No existing automation technology is made to handle such complexity, or has the required reactivity. This is the project we spend most of our energy on, we call it _Harmony_. We see it as the way to make computing infrastructure sing in an efficient and harmonious way all across the globe.

Harmony will be able to

• Perform complex upgrades across heterogenous environments.
• Manage distribution of data to edge locations where the global bandwidth will be optimized during the lifetime of this data bit.
• Send workloads where energy is available and heating is required.

We're still in early stages of development, but we can already

• Package and deploy an application in a few simple lines of code, in a way that is more robust and reliable than any other tool we know.
• Build a complete, highly available datacenter in a few lines of code leveraging enterprise ready open source components

There is much more to come, but we're on a mission. A mission that cannot be carried alone. A mission that can nudge the world into a better place. Of course, technology does not mean happiness.

But technology put to good use, in a humane way means good things for humans.

Where will we get? Only time travelers can tell. But at NationTech we firmly believe this is a mission worth pursuing.

What does this all mean ?

We’re exploring where physics, economics, and humane computing align. In many places, that means bringing compute closer to people and turning waste heat into a community asset.

We aim to prove this step by step—through open designs, credible pilots, and shared standards—so that in a decade a meaningful share of the world’s computing is cleaner, more resilient, and more locally beneficial.

Want to contribute ? Become a customer ?

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