Cloudflare Workers Technical Lead Kenton Varda and his wife Jade Wang have built a LAN-optimized home from scratch in Austin, showcasing event photos on their official website. The entire project cost seven figures and is not a simple renovation of an old house.

22 computers cost about $75,000: most are connected via fiber optics to a central server room, which is cooled by approximately 15 kW of air conditioning; the configuration includes Intel Core i5-13600, GeForce RTX 4070, and 32GB of memory, with a unified network drive image allowing the whole team to play new games at once. The basement has 12 folding desk workstations, while upstairs there is a conference table that can be opened to reveal 6 additional computers and two workstations, along with two call rooms equipped with workstations. Under the floorboards are four Dance Dance Revolution mats. The architect is his father, Richard Varda. The family still lives in the house, which includes two children and a cat. The gatherings are primarily for invited friends, focusing on cooperative games; he emphasizes that gaming is merely a social catalyst. A smaller version of the LAN house existed in Palo Alto in 2011. Linus Tech Tips later visited and filmed.

Who is buying and who is selling: what is being bought is social interaction confined within the same building, and what is being sold is the gatherings of strangers matched online. The event is driven by the engineer's self-built home, funded by personal salary and the monetization of an old house, not by Cloudflare's capital expenditure. The beneficiaries are high school friends and colleagues who can be invited into the house, while the burdens are the electricity bill and the invitation list. The highest configuration is not the graphics card ranking, but the people willing to come under the same roof.

The house is not open to the public; the seven-figure cost refers to the entire building, not broken down to per square meter.

Source: Public Information