Ryan Collison

Tungsten and the Chip Supply Chain The compute ceiling isn't just about energy. It's also about stuff—the physical materials that go into making chips. And one of the most critical, least discussed materials is tungsten. Tungsten is everywhere in semiconductors. It's in the

Nuclear for AI: Why Data Centers Want Reactors In September 2024, Microsoft announced it was restarting the Three Mile Island nuclear plant. Yes, that Three Mile Island—the site of America's worst commercial nuclear accident in 1979. The company signed a twenty-year power purchase agreement with Constellation

Neuromorphic Chips: Silicon Learns from Neurons If you can't grow a brain in a dish—or don't want to deal with the complications of keeping tissue alive—there's another option: build silicon that acts like a brain. This is the neuromorphic computing approach. Instead

Organoid Intelligence: Wetware as Compute In 2022, a company called Cortical Labs published a paper with an audacious title: "In vitro neurons learn and exhibit sentience when embodied in a simulated game-world." They had grown a small cluster of human neurons in a dish. They connected it

The Brain's Impossible Efficiency: 20 Watts Here's a number that should make every computer scientist uncomfortable: 20 watts. That's the power consumption of an adult human brain. A typical incandescent light bulb uses more. A laptop uses three to four times as much. A

One paradox, one number: the floor beneath all computing, how it was measured, and how far our machines are from it. Part two of two.