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I wonder what they have for local storage. ISTR from my BOINC days that most applications wanted a hefty storage area so their job servers didn't have to be arsed to talk to the nodes more than once a day or so.

From the Qarnot FAQ: In addition, Q.rads computing nodes are stateless without any storage.

These don't appear to be high radiance units as they are partly convective, but I have seen similar mostly-touch-safe (not that you'd want to) wall units in use in homes...

From the Qarnot FAQ: Q.rad can heat a 150 to 250 sq. feet room in a building meeting modern isolation standards. The Q.rad is a system with high inertia and produces a high quality soft heat as opposed to electrical convectors.

The conventional equivalent would somewhere between a low temperature surface heater and an oil filled electric radiator.

I know the French take a vacation in August, but it seems like you wouldn't want a space heater running during any of the summer.

From the Qarnot FAQ:

The processors of the Q.rads are regulated to meet the target temperature defined by the end-user. The computing power is naturally impacted by seasonality. By using processors low power modes and by choosing adapted deployment sites, Qarnot manages to keep a minimum computing capacity all year long. To compute all-year round when computing demand is higher than the deployed capacity, Qarnot also starts to have partnerships with green data centers and to develop other products for sites that need heat all year long (water, industry/agriculture).

Qarnot computing is setting up partnerships with private and public research centers and labs which regularly launch computation campaigns that can last up to several years. Such campaigns include BOINC and many other academic projects. Thus, Q.rads will always have a background buffer of useful computations to process to produce heat when inhabitants need heating.

Because this business model is not well though-of. Internet informs me that AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 1700X consumes 95 W of power, much like an old-school light-bulb.

95W to which you add power consumption for the motherboard chipset, RAM, network card, and power supply. Qarnot has been on the market for two years already so I'm pretty sure they know what they are doing by now.

Crappy oil radiators seem to start at 600 W (about 6 CPUs) and better ones have a power consumption of up to 2500 W (26 CPUs).

Bigger = better. Are you American? A 2600W heater is not any better if what you need is a 500W one. Also one big 2600W heater is not better than two 1300W ones as it concentrates all the heat in one place causing uneven heating. Finally they are mostly targeting new building that, by law, have to follow low-energy standards and thus need much less heating.

Even if the CPUs reach a rather elevated temperature (1700X maxes out at 95 C), the surface temperature of the rack is only going to be luke warm, so you're not going to get any heat radiated to you.

Wow! You don't know anything about heating, do you?

High temperature heaters are really out of fashion because they cause lots of convection, moving the dust around, and because all the heat to go to the ceiling leaving the reat of the room, where you are, cold, thus increasing heating costs.

So nowadays most everyone buys low temperature heaters that provide a mix of convection and heating via infrared radiation (with its ultimate form being underfloor heating). They provide a much more even heating which lets you turn the thermostat down and thus save on power.

The heat is going to reach you by convection via the fans, which is a crappy way to warm yourself up.

From the Qarnot FAQ: Q.rads are totally silent since there are no mobile parts inside the Q.rad (no ventilators, no hard drives).

The costs of installation, transportation etc, however, are going to eat away most of the savings in my opinion.

That's probably why they don't target individual houses. Again from their FAQ: For now, we only install Q.rads in buildings for a minimum of 20 units !

I suppose, of course, that Qarnot will be paying for the electricity.

Still from their FAQ: Qarnot computing sells the computing power of the Q.rads to companies and research centers. The selling of these services pays for the electricity used by the Q.rads and therefore the heating that is produced. Each Q.rad continuously records its energetic (kW/h) and computing (CPU.h) consumption which enables Qarnot to bill its computing clients and refund the electricity consumed.

Because this business model is not well though-of. Internet informs me that AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 1700X consumes 95 W of power, much like an old-school light-bulb.

95W to which you add power consumption for the motherboard chipset, RAM, network card, and power supply. Qarnot has been on the market for two years already so I'm pretty sure they know what they are doing by now.

Crappy oil radiators seem to start at 600 W (about 6 CPUs) and better ones have a power consumption of up to 2500 W (26 CPUs).

Bigger = better. Are you American? A 2600W heater is not any better if what you need is a 500W one. Also one big 2600W heater is not better than two 1300W ones as it concentrates all the heat in one place causing uneven heating. Finally they are mostly targeting new building that, by law, have to follow low-energy standards and thus need much less heating.

Even if the CPUs reach a rather elevated temperature (1700X maxes out at 95 C), the surface temperature of the rack is only going to be luke warm, so you're not going to get any heat radiated to you.

Wow! You don't know anything about heating, do you?

High temperature heaters are really out of fashion because they cause lots of convection, moving the dust around, and because all the heat to go to the ceiling leaving the reat of the room, where you are, cold, thus increasing heating costs.

So nowadays most everyone buys low temperature heaters that provide a mix of convection and heating via infrared radiation (with its ultimate form being underfloor heating). They provide a much more even heating which lets you turn the thermostat down and thus save on power.

The heat is going to reach you by convection via the fans, which is a crappy way to warm yourself up.

From the Qarnot FAQ: Q.rads are totally silent since there are no mobile parts inside the Q.rad (no ventilators, no hard drives).

The costs of installation, transportation etc, however, are going to eat away most of the savings in my opinion.

That's probably why they don't target individual houses. Again from their FAQ: For now, we only install Q.rads in buildings for a minimum of 20 units !

I suppose, of course, that Qarnot will be paying for the electricity.

Still from their FAQ: Qarnot computing sells the computing power of the Q.rads to companies and research centers. The selling of these services pays for the electricity used by the Q.rads and therefore the heating that is produced. Each Q.rad continuously records its energetic (kW/h) and computing (CPU.h) consumption which enables Qarnot to bill its computing clients and refund the electricity consumed.

And also the noise, imagine a rack of servers at full load, it will not generate that much heat, but it will sound like a jet engine.

From their FAQ: Q.rads are totally silent since there are no mobile parts inside the Q.rad (no ventilators, no hard drives).

I guess they wouldn't have the costs of a datacenter, but also wouldn't have the benefits, like fast network, someone nearby to solve any issues (imagine a server shutsdown in the middle of the night,

See above: no moving part. This greatly improves reliability. Plus, still from their FAQ: In addition, Q.rads computing nodes are stateless without any storage.. Finally this is distributed computing, no server is critical. If one device dies down, then just direct the workload to any other.

Besides that, using resistive heating is terribly energy inefficient, a heat pump is much more economical.

Datacenters need lots of cooling and lots of infrastructure for redundancy. Here redundancy is provided by geographical distribution: if a town block loses power then that only impacts a small part of the computing capacity. Same for Internet connectivity. And cooling is not needed. Finally the buildings these devices are heating would have needed heating anyway. So when you compare the two, on one side you need to add the energy needed for the computing, cooling and providing redundancy to the datacenter, and heating the buildings that would have been Qarnot customers; and on the other side, just heating Qarnot customers. I'll concede to some hidden costs: Qarnot still needs some central servers to distribute the work (but that's not much) and it increases Internet traffic which is not as energy efficient as just distributing data inside a datacenter.

And while I like heat pumps they are not very popular in France and do have drawbacks like a lot of noise and questionable power output depending on climate.