A Cardano bare-metal server is a computer that is a single-tenant physical server this is running a Carnado node and is connected to the Cardano network. The computer is not shared between users, unlike cloud hosted servers or other modern forms of virtualisation.

The computer can be in the form of a static device like a Rock-Pi, a desktop, or a rack-mounted computer hardware. It can also be in the form of a mobile device like a mobile phone, a tablet, or a laptop.