Ugreen Drops $20,000 on Local AI Smart Home, But Skips Home Assistant Support
Ugreen unveiled HomeAgent, MasterAgent, and SynCare cameras at Gillette Stadium, pitching local AI that never touches the cloud. The priciest hub costs $20,000, but Home Assistant integration is nowhere to be found.
A company that built its name on fast chargers and NAS enclosures just rolled out a smart home hub priced at $20,000—easily the most jaw-dropping moment at Ugreen's launch event at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts. At the September 3 event, Ugreen officially entered the "AIoT" space, unveiling a smart home ecosystem built on local computing instead of the cloud. At its core are three ARM-based AI hubs: HomeAgent, HomeAgent Pro, and the flagship MasterAgent, alongside indoor/outdoor security cameras, a smart photo frame, and a smart speaker.
The pitch is straightforward: Amazon and Google smart home devices ship your data off to the cloud for processing, while Ugreen wants to keep that computing right in your own home. The base model HA100 runs on a Rockchip RK3588 platform with 16GB of LPDDR5 memory, delivering 26 TOPS of AI performance for rule-based automation, object classification, and device control commands. It's priced at $1,799, with an early-bird price of $899. The upgraded HA100 Pro swaps in a CIX-CP8180 (P1) chip and doubles the memory to 32GB, pushing performance up to 205 TOPS. It adds motion and behavioral intent detection, plus the ability to set up automation rules through natural-language voice commands. It's priced at $5,999, with an early-bird price of $2,999.
The $20,000 MasterAgent is basically a mini AI server for your living room
The true flagship is the MasterAgent MA100, built on Nvidia's Jetson Thor platform—a Blackwell system module packed with 128GB of unified memory, delivering up to 2,070 TOPS of AI performance. It's priced at $20,000, with early-bird buyers getting 50% off. At a panel during the launch event, Ugreen NAS community manager Thomas Brown argued that running local AI models long-term saves money compared to continually paying for cloud inference tokens, and marketing materials echoed that it also cuts cloud storage costs. That math might hold up, but for most people, the entry price alone is the real barrier.
All three hubs support ONVIF and Matter-compatible devices out of the box, and product planning manager Markus Xie said Zigbee and Thread support is in the works too—meaning devices from brands like Anker's Eufy could eventually connect as well. (Anker, incidentally, announced its own AI smart home hub the same day.) Here's the awkward part: Ugreen currently offers no official Home Assistant support, while Anker's new hub supports both Home Assistant and Apple HomeKit right out of the gate. Sticking with a habit from its NAS lineup, all three hubs require users to supply their own SATA drives for the built-in bays, and they also come with M.2 slots, SD card slots, HDMI, Ethernet, and multiple network ports. Only one working HomeAgent unit was on hand at the event, demoed controlling smart curtains and lights—more complex features like voice-created automation rules weren't actually shown in action.
SynCare cameras land an NFL star as spokesperson—and raise privacy questions of their own
The three SynCare cameras—the indoor Indoor Cam ID500 Pro, the wired PoE Cam OD600 Pro, and the battery-powered Battery Cam OD800 Pro—are the most polished products in this lineup, and the same models Ugreen showed off at CES earlier this year with a promised second-half-2026 launch. Xie said remote access uses end-to-end encryption, while local data is protected with AES-256 encryption. In a facial recognition demo at the event, a camera positioned near the entrance issued an intrusion warning as someone approached, then triggered a full alarm once they got within a few feet. Pricing: the ID500 Pro runs $149 (early-bird $89), the OD600 Pro is $269 (early-bird $159), and the OD800 Pro is $399 (early-bird $199). Ugreen tapped New England Patriots cornerback and Ugreen global brand ambassador Christian Gonzalez for a promotional video, in which he uses an indoor camera to capture moments with his family. Even with data staying within the home network, having a camera on standby around the clock that automatically picks out "highlight moments" still feels a little unsettling.
The voice assistant is named Uliya, paired with a smart speaker shaped like an elongated cylinder wrapped in fabric, with an LED light ring around the base. The wake word is simply "Uliya," and it's priced at $99, with an early-bird price of $69. The standout oddity of the lineup is a 13.3-inch color e-paper photo frame called Ugreen Gallery. For now, its only trick is using e-paper to make photos look more like real prints in a 4:3 frame—no smart home info display has been added yet. It's priced at $439, with an early-bird price of $299.
Direct pre-orders for HomeAgent and MasterAgent are open from September 3 through October 27, after which the campaign shifts to Kickstarter crowdfunding through the end of the year, when the rest of the product lineup will also become available. Ugreen expects shipments to begin in January 2026. As Engadget noted in its coverage, if the current state of AI smart home experiences from Google Gemini or Amazon Alexa+ is any indication, users should brace for some rough edges along the way—and with only limited hands-on access to review units so far, how well this all actually works remains to be seen.
