Homeowners are being encouraged to host business clouds in return for the free heating generated by the servers.
Dutch firm Nerdalize's crowdfunded project sees it offer companies 50% cheaper hosting bills by swapping costly data centres for people's homes, who also benefit by saving up to €300 a year on their energy bills, according to the company.
Such an arrangement can significantly cut back on CO2 emissions, Nerdalize said, claiming traditional data centres emit more CO2 than the global airline industry.
"Current data centres are huge energy wasters," the firm said. "Combined, datacenters use up more electricity than India. One reason the industry is so energy intensive is that 40% of its total energy consumption [is] on cooling to get rid of this heat. Nerdalize avoids the data centre entirely by placing these heat producing servers as aided heating systems in homes."
Following a 2015 trial with Dutch utility firm Eneco and five households that transferred the server heat to a radiator, the startup is set to run an August trial with 42 households - another 3,500 signalled their interest in taking part.
The startup is currently running a crowdfunding campaign until the end of June to install the first 42 households in the Netherlands with this new heating system. The campaign has already raised £363,547, which is 167% of its goal.
Nerdalize co-founder Boaz Leupe said: "If we reach our target amount in a month, we can start equipping the first houses with our server-heater from August onwards."
