The initial concept developed by the company involved using heat generated by Bitcoin mining rigs, according to Heata Co-founder and CTO Chris Jordan.

"We literally put a Bitcoin miner in a barrel of mineral oil and plumbed it up to a radiator," he told The Register.

Edit, because I think folks may be confused due to the quote I put in. They are not installing crypto miners into water heaters. That was just their original inspiration. Sorry for the confusion.

"We're not looking at serving real time workloads, we're not doing websites, databases, message queue servers," Jordan explained. "Our ideal job is; here's a chunk of data, go and process that for some hours. And here's the result," he said.

This could still prove useful for 3D rendering workloads, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, and others where there is a lot of CPU or GPU processing, he claimed.