  We study a putative (strange) metal-to-insulator transition in a granular
array of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) quantum dots, each occupied by a large
number N>>1 of charge-carrying fermions. Extending the previous studies we
complement the SYK couplings by the physically relevant Coulomb interactions
and focus on the effects of charge fluctuations, evaluating the conductivity
and density of states. The latter were found to demonstrate marked changes of
behavior when the effective inter-site tunneling becomes comparable to the
renormalized Coulomb energy, thus signifying the transition in question.
