Ugreen HA100: A NAS That Runs AI Locally and Acts as Your Smart Home Hub

One Device, Three Identities

Ugreen built its reputation on chargers, but has since made serious inroads in the NAS market. Now they're unveiling their most ambitious product yet — the HomeAgent HA100. This isn't just a network-attached storage device anymore; it crams NAS storage, a smart home hub, and a local AI assistant into a single machine.

The key selling point: all AI processing happens on-device, with no data sent to the cloud. In an era of growing privacy anxiety, that positioning alone is a compelling argument.

The design stays consistent with Ugreen's previous NAS lineup — and that's a good thing. The company has earned solid credibility in the NAS space through fair pricing, a user-friendly interface, and a no-subscription model. Buy the hardware once, and it's yours.

Unboxing and Hardware Details

Inside the box alongside the HA100 itself is a fairly substantial accessories pack: an Ethernet cable, power cable, AC-to-DC adapter, screwdriver, drive screws, and a notably thick thermal pad — designed for the bottom SSD bay. There's also a cover plate to fill the slot when no AI accelerator module is installed.

The front panel includes a USB-C port and SD card reader for data import or storage expansion, plus an NFC reader and a color touchscreen. On top you'll find a microphone array, a mic mute button with mute indicator, and volume up/down controls.

A microphone array and volume buttons are unusual on a NAS — but since this device is designed to interact with the AI assistant Yulia (or another assistant of your choosing), they make perfect sense.

The rear is equally thoughtful: a magnetic dust filter, a 140mm cooling fan, power button, power input, an HDMI port for multimedia output, two USB 3.0 ports, a 2.5G Ethernet port, and four PoE ports. The 2.5G Ethernet is a welcome upgrade — it's time to move past gigabit. The four PoE ports have an obvious purpose: powering home security cameras directly.

Inside the chassis, wireless radio modules handle Matter device control, with support for Wi-Fi, Thread, and Zigbee.

Storage, NVR, and Upgradeable AI Modules

Popping it open, there are two dedicated drive bays for network storage. You can run them in a non-redundant array to maximize capacity, or configure redundancy to protect against drive failure. A third bay is dedicated to NVR (Network Video Recorder) storage for security camera footage.

The AI accelerator card is designed as a swappable module — a smart call. Given how rapidly AI acceleration hardware evolves, modularity means there's a clear upgrade path. It appears to use a standard PCIe x4 slot (whether electrically so remains unconfirmed). The bottom SSD bay pairs with that extra-thick thermal pad and an aluminum cover plate that doubles as a heatsink.

TOPS (Tera Operations Per Second) is the standard metric for AI inference chip throughput, specifically measuring integer or fixed-point operations — distinct from the FLOPS (floating-point operations) typically used for CPUs and GPUs. 6 TOPS is entry-level for edge inference, capable of basic object detection and classification. 160 TOPS approaches mid-to-high-end edge AI accelerator territory, supporting real-time multi-stream video analysis. 2000+ TFLOPS (note the unit shift to floating-point) corresponds to flagship modules like the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin, capable of running larger language models and handling complex multi-step agentic workflows. That's precisely where the modular design pays off: AI chip performance tends to leap generationally every two to three years, and swappable modules let users keep pace without replacing the entire device.

Local AI Security: Privacy Is the Point

Ugreen is also launching a companion camera lineup. As you'd expect in 2026, AI is front and center in the marketing — but critically, all processing happens locally on the camera or the connected device. Many users are understandably uneasy about streaming footage from inside (or outside) their homes to remote servers, which makes Ugreen's local-first approach genuinely appealing.

The launch outdoor camera supports a three-axis motorized pan-tilt-zoom, up to 4K resolution, and PoE connectivity — meaning a single cable handles both power and data. It also supports Wi-Fi, two-way audio, and a floodlight deterrent. Solar-plus-battery and indoor USB-C-powered variants are also available.

At the demo area inside Gillette Stadium, Ugreen demonstrated voice-controlled blinds, lighting, and other standard smart home features — with the key distinction that every demo ran locally, without an internet connection. One particularly notable demo used facial recognition to determine whether a visitor was a "friend or foe," identifying family members and approved individuals against reference photos. Local processing also handles vehicle, animal, and package detection, making it far easier to scrub through security footage for specific events.

Real-time capabilities are equally impressive: one demo showed the Yulia assistant proactively alerting you when a baby is crying, and natural language queries like "do you know where your dog is?" are supported. English, German, and Mandarin are currently available. Since the NAS has access to everything the cameras see and all your stored files, the efficiency potential is enormous ("Hey Yulia, find that document for me") — but so would be the risk if that data were processed off-site. That's exactly why the local-only approach matters.

PoE (Power over Ethernet) is defined by IEEE 802.3af/at/bt standards, allowing standard Ethernet cables to simultaneously carry data and DC power — up to 90W under 802.3bt. For security cameras, this dramatically simplifies installation: a single Cat5e or Cat6 cable to the mounting location handles everything, with no need for a separate power outlet or adapter. The HA100's four rear PoE ports let the NAS act as both switch and power manager; camera feeds travel back over the same cable and are recorded to the dedicated NVR drive bay, forming a fully closed local loop that eliminates any hardware-level need for data to leave the premises. ONVIF (Open Network Video Interface Forum) is the IP camera industry's interoperability standard, ensuring devices from different manufacturers can recognize and control each other — which is the technical foundation behind Ugreen's compatibility claims.

Three Performance Tiers and Pricing

All demos at the event ran on the standard HA100 with just 6 TOPS of compute, starting at $899 on Kickstarter.

For heavier workloads, the HA100 Pro bumps compute to 160 TOPS, starting at $3,000. At the top end, the Master Agent packs an NVIDIA Jetson delivering over 2,000 TFLOPS and up to 128GB of memory, enabling richer contextual understanding and agentic workflows — though even at a 50% Kickstarter discount, it'll run you $10,000. That said, you don't need the most expensive model to understand what Ugreen is going for.

The core logic is clear: NAS is no longer just storage — it's a unified platform for smart security, local data, and home automation.

A More Complete Ecosystem

Alongside the main unit, Ugreen also announced a companion Yulia smart speaker (since you won't always be sitting next to your NAS) and a Gallery smart photo frame claiming up to six months of battery life with a 13.3-inch display.

Perhaps the most commendable aspect is the openness: HomeAgent and Master Agent are compatible with ONVIF-standard cameras and Matter smart home devices — you're not locked into Ugreen's own hardware ecosystem.

Finally, there's a small gadget unrelated to smart home: the MagFlow Pro, which supports Qi2 wireless charging at up to 25W and uses a Peltier semiconductor cooler to chill the back of your phone, maintaining higher charging speeds for longer. Noise performance from the thermal side still needs real-world verification, but the sheer dedication to "quirky thermal solutions" is its own form of entertainment.

The HA100 is now available for pre-order, with a $50 deposit locking in a 50% discount. For anyone looking for a single device that handles storage, local AI security, and home automation without handing their data to the cloud, Ugreen's offering is worth a close look.

Matter is a unified smart home protocol led by Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung, and others through the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), officially released in 2022. It runs over IP networks and aims to end smart home fragmentation, enabling devices from different brands to interoperate locally without cloud intermediaries. Thread is one of Matter's underlying wireless mesh protocols, designed for low-power IoT devices with self-healing routing; Zigbee is an earlier-generation low-power mesh protocol with a large installed base. The HA100 includes radios for all three protocols, meaning it can serve as a Thread Border Router bridging Thread devices into the Matter ecosystem while also supporting legacy Zigbee hardware — making it a genuinely comprehensive whole-home smart home protocol hub.