Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

Great idea but is this real?

Its a page hosted on CLoudFlare's "pages.dev" service. Their method of contact is a Google Form which does have an email address on this domain "CoLaptop [dot] com", but that as a web address does not work.

I'm not sure they have their act together.

Say what you want about an old laptop, they sure are a lot faster than a $150/mo azure VM. And to be clear, I mean a _LOT_ faster.

pages.dev, you can't be serious.

A friend of mine sent it to me and it seems like an interesting option now that hardware pricing has gone insane?

Eeek, I can't imagine what this is like if it scales. What happens to the fire risk when theres 20,000 laptops with aging batteries all sitting together? I hope they take the batteries out, however many laptops use batteries to smooth out power fluctuations.

Laptops aren't designed to be servers - peg your laptop CPU and GPU at 100% and see how long it lasts, I've done this before and the answer is about "2 months", yep sure, this effort isn't targeting that workload, but how many bad apples does it take to start a fire? In their page they say "kubernetes server - no problem" kubernetes DOES keep the CPUs busy, not pegged, but busy enough so that they wont step down their frequency.

I admire the effort to reuse old tech, but boy oh boy would I not want to be a sysadmin here!