Everything You
Wanted to Ask.

A Neighborhood Smart Vault (NSV) is a prefabricated underground data center installed 12 feet beneath grade in residential, multi-family, or commercial developments. It contains a high-density GPU compute cluster cooled by two-phase immersion fluid. The waste heat from compute is captured and redirected to power the building's amenities — pool heating, snow melt, and HVAC — eliminating the need for traditional gas boilers.

Server hardware is fully submerged in a non-conductive dielectric fluid. As the chips heat up, the fluid vaporizes at the chip surface, carrying heat away with extreme efficiency, then condenses on a cooler heat exchanger and falls back. There are no fans inside the vault, no air handlers, and no chillers. The result is silent operation, near-zero water use, and a heat-transfer rate roughly 1,200× more effective than air cooling.

It's the order in which the vault's waste heat is reused before any energy is wasted: Stage 1 captures heat directly off the GPU racks via the immersion loop. Stage 2 sends the hottest fluid to domestic hot water and pool/spa heating. Stage 3 circulates lower-temperature fluid through hydronic walkways, ramps, and entry corridors for snow melt. Stage 4 feeds residual warmth into an absorption chiller for summer cooling. Heat is reused down a temperature gradient until it has done useful work at every stage.

Safe Harbor is the building's emergency resiliency mode. When the local grid fails, the vault's BESS (Battery Energy Storage System) automatically islands the property and continues to power critical loads — life-safety systems, elevators, lighting, refrigeration, the clubhouse or lobby refuge, and connectivity (fiber + Starlink). Residents and tenants retain heat, light, network, and a designated refuge space for at least 72 hours.

Yes. The vault sits 12 ft below grade in a sealed concrete enclosure with no fans, no compressors, and no air movement. There is nothing for sound to couple to at the surface. Surface-level mechanical components (pumps, heat exchangers) operate at levels below typical residential HVAC.

The vault is a sealed, double-contained vessel; any leak is captured inside the secondary containment with no path to soil or groundwater. The dielectric fluid itself is non-flammable, non-toxic, and non-conductive — it is the same family of fluids used in industrial transformer cooling for decades. Sensors continuously monitor fluid level, temperature, and dielectric integrity.

Each vault has redundant uplinks: fiber as primary and a Starlink dish as automatic failover. The handoff happens at the edge router with sub-second cutover. Vault AI (the on-premise assistant) continues to function fully even if both uplinks fail, because all inference runs locally on the vault's GPU cluster.

A typical NSV deployment runs 18–20 weeks from site assessment to commissioning, and runs concurrently with standard residential or commercial construction so it adds no time to the overall project schedule.

Yes. Retrofits are typically installed beneath an existing parking lot or under a parking structure footprint. The vault is dropped into place with crane access, the thermal loop is tied into the existing mechanical risers, and electrical interconnect is coordinated with the local utility. Retrofit timelines depend on site access and existing mechanical configuration.

For new construction, none — the vault excavation happens alongside foundation work. For retrofits, a portion of parking is unavailable during the excavation and lift phase (typically 6–10 weeks). Underground work avoids the noise and dust of above-grade construction, and the vault itself produces no ongoing operational disruption once commissioned.

A buildable footprint of roughly 30×60 ft, geotechnical conditions suitable for a 12 ft excavation, utility interconnect capacity for the compute load, and a clear path for the thermal distribution loop to the building's mechanical room. Our site assessment confirms suitability before any commitment.

No. All Vault AI inference, smart home automation, and security analytics run on the vault's local GPU cluster inside your building or community boundary. Voice commands, camera feeds, and personal data never traverse the public internet. The full data governance model is detailed on our Security & Privacy page.

Residents and tenants own their own data. Vault AI runs open-weight foundation models locally; any fine-tuning on resident data stays on the local cluster and is not shared back to NSV or any third party.

Each tenant's workloads run inside an isolated, encrypted compute container with its own keys. Tenants cannot see each other's traffic, data, or AI sessions. Resource isolation is enforced at the hypervisor and storage layers.

No. NSV operations staff have access to system telemetry (temperature, fluid integrity, network health) but not to tenant data, workloads, or AI sessions. Cryptographic key custody remains with the building owner or the resident.

The building or development owns the vault as a permanent capital asset, just as it would own a boiler plant or rooftop chiller. NSV provides design, installation, commissioning, and ongoing operations and maintenance under a service agreement.

NSV operations teams handle scheduled maintenance, dielectric fluid sampling, GPU refresh cycles, and remote monitoring 24/7. Building staff have no direct maintenance responsibility for the vault interior. Full operational details are on our Operations & Maintenance page.

Service windows are planned and scheduled. The thermal loop has buffer capacity sized to maintain pool, spa, and snow-melt operation through any planned maintenance interval. For unplanned events, conventional electric resistance backup keeps critical systems online.

The civil structure (concrete vessel, conduit, piping) is engineered for a 50+ year service life. Compute hardware is refreshed on a 4–6 year cadence as part of the operations agreement. The dielectric fluid is sampled annually and refreshed only when sampling indicates degradation — typically every 7–10 years.

The dielectric fluid is recovered and recycled by the manufacturer. Servers and batteries are returned to certified e-waste recyclers. The concrete vessel can either be repurposed for storage, civil utility use, or thermal energy storage — or fully removed and the site restored.

Above grade you won't see anything. There is no equipment yard, no exhaust vent, no rooftop chiller. What you will notice is the things you no longer have to think about: the pool is warm year-round, the walkways are never icy, the lights stay on when the grid is down, and the AI assistant in your unit responds instantly with no cloud lag.

No. Two-phase immersion cooling is a closed-loop system — the dielectric fluid recirculates indefinitely. The thermal distribution loop to the building uses a closed glycol or water mix that is filled once and topped off only as needed. There is no evaporative cooling tower and no ongoing water consumption.

Yes. The vault is a sealed concrete enclosure 12 ft below grade with no public access, no flammable materials, and continuous remote monitoring. Surface-level mechanical equipment is housed and locked. The full safety, code, and insurance posture is summarized on our Compliance page.