The show floor at CES 2026 is the kind of place where you’re liable to see a water heater in one booth and an advanced computer in another. At Superheat‘s booth, they’re the same thing. But the real opportunity for this unexpected tech combo is far beyond internet money.
Computers that do intensive tasks, such as training AI models or mining cryptocurrency, get super hot, and that’s a problem. In the data centers popping up all over the country to power the AI boom, cooling is the biggest source of energy demand after running the computers themselves. So what if, instead of wasting that heat by dispersing it or boiling a lake, you used it to make your shower hot? That’s the idea behind Superheat, in a nutshell.
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Superheat’s bitcoin-mining water heater uses the waste heat from a computer in the top to heat water for your shower.
Superheat said its water heaters are designed for homes, apartments and commercial buildings. The company says it uses the same amount of energy as a standard electric water heater, but the owner will get some of that energy expense back in the form of cryptocurrency mining. How much? Superheat says you could get enough to offset the cost of heating water (which is probably your second biggest energy expense after heating and cooling your air). The Superheat H1 water heater itself is expected to cost around $2,000 – a bit more than typical electric water heaters.
Read more: CES 2026: 10 of the Wildest Tech Products We’ve Seen So Far
Mining bitcoin – the current function these water heaters can carry out – involves a computer going through an intensive mathematical calculation similar to solving a puzzle. Produce one of those solved puzzles, called a hash, and you’re rewarded with bitcoin, which can be sold and exchanged like currency. The price of one bitcoin is notoriously volatile, but lately it’s been hovering around $90,000.
Superheat’s water heaters are equipped with specialized bitcoin mining equipment known as application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs. That computer module sits on top of a fairly standard 50-gallon water heater. The model at Superheat’s booth was pumping hot water into a bathtub when I visited.
The Superheat app shows the temperature of the water in the water heater and the productivity of the bitcoin mining computer heating it up.
A water heater that mines bitcoin is novel and interesting in itself, but perhaps the most compelling part is what could happen if these machines could work together across wide, distributed networks — hundreds or thousands of water heaters all operating as if they were one computer or one data center. This doesn’t have to be limited to bitcoin. Imagine the big AI companies paying you something to use the computing power of your water heater instead of building a giant data center across the street and driving your power bill up.
That’s Superheat’s longer-term vision, said Julie Xu, the company’s head of operations. “Our ultimate goal is to use this for the cloud and AI inference,” she said.
Like a virtual power plant, a lot of home appliances working together can serve the same purpose as one big piece of infrastructure. In this case, lowering the energy costs of computing by combining with something that’s already going to be used.