Back in 2020, the company stepped out of the charger and mobile accessory market and entered an entirely new realm with the introduction of its NAS line. Since then, UGREEN has focused on expanding its NAS lineup with newer and more powerful models. In fact, UGREEN has become my go-to NAS brand, dethroning my love for Synology that has lasted for well over a decade.

This week, though, UGREEN introduced something entirely new in its HomeAgent platform. Instead of just functioning as a NAS, HomeAgent is designed to be the central component of your local smart home.

The entire HomeAgent platform is designed to be a local-first smart home system, featuring local video recording capabilities, local AI functionality, and local smart home control.

Alongside the HomeAgent platform, UGREEN is also introducing an ecosystem of smart home products compatible with its new system. There’s an indoor camera, two outdoor cameras, a smart speaker, and a color E-Ink photo frame. These products are all made by UGREEN and are directly and natively supported within the HomeAgent ecosystem. For example, you can use your UGREEN smart speaker to trigger taking a picture with one of your cameras, and then have it displayed on the photo frame.

While there are only four accessories in the ecosystem now, UGREEN does have Matter support within the HomeAgent platform and has commented that some form of Home Assistant support should be available before launch.

Local control is more than about offline access

UGREEN’s HomeAgent platform is designed to be local first. Local AI, local video recordings, local everything. While many companies tout local AI, UGREEN is actually putting its money (or, really, your money) where its mouth is. There are three versions of the HomeAgent system—the HA100, HA100 Pro, and Master Agent.

Each model has a different amount of power it can offer, with the HA100 capable of running 4B parameter local AI models, the HA100 Pro running 32B parameter models, and the Master Agent capable of 122B parameter models. The problem is, the most expensive model, the Master Agent, which has 2,070 FP4 TFLOPS of computing power and 128GB of RAM, has a retail price of $19,999 (and a pre-order price of $9,999). It’s prohibitively expensive, but it does offer insanely powerful local AI capabilities.

The HA100 and HA100 Pro will retail for $1,799 and $5,999 respectively, with pre-order pricing starting at $899 and $2,999. Really though, the majority of people will be fine with the HA100 or HA100 Pro for their smart home setup. UGREEN’s HomeAgent platform goes on pre-order starting today with the Kickstarter beginning in October.

The only question that has not been answered yet—and won’t be able to be answered until the system starts shipping—is: does anything actually leave the HomeAgent platform or does it stay 100% local? UGREEN claims that this is a local-first platform, but we won’t know for sure until actual hands-on testing happens.

I’m very happy that UGREEN is pioneering this stage of smart homes, and I am very intrigued by what the HomeAgent platform brings to the table. Truly locally run AI and locally controlled smart homes are the future, and UGREEN just might be the company to take us there.