The Company That Made a Dish of Neurons Play DOOM Is Getting Into Brain Cell-Powered Data Centers

A computer platform that runs on human neurons (and recently showed off said neurons’ ability to play DOOM) now wants in on the data center boom.

Australia-based Cortical Labs announced today that it is working on two of what it calls “biological data centers,†one in Melbourne and another in Singapore. Instead of relying on traditional GPU servers, these facilities would be powered by Cortical Labs’ biological CL1 units.

Each of these bio-computers is equipped with a chip known as a “multi-electrode array†that has 200,000 human brain neurons grown directly on it. For comparison, the human brain is estimated to contain between 60 billion and 99 billion neurons.

The announcement comes as tech giants like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and OpenAI are spending billions of dollars to build new data centers to train and run their most advanced AI models. 

Beyond sounding like a mad scientist’s fever dream, a data center run on neurons could have a practical benefit. Traditional data centers are notoriously energy-hungry, with many requiring the equivalent power needed to supply entire neighborhoods.

In some areas where large data centers have been built, the demand has strained local power grids and driven up electricity prices. That, in turn, has sparked community backlash against certain projects. Even President Donald Trump has gotten involved and made major tech companies pinky swear that they will cover the power costs of their projects. 

Conversely, neuron-powered computer chips surprisingly use far less energy than traditional AI chips. Cortical Labs CEO Hon Weng Chong told Bloomberg that each CL1 computer uses less power than a handheld calculator.

The computers work by sending electrical signals to neurons grown from blood stem cells. The chip then records the neurons’ electrical responses to that stimulation as computing output. The company made headlines in February after posting a video showing how its team managed to get the neurons to play a version of the video game DOOM.

Now the company is building a data center in Melbourne that will house 120 CL1 units.

In Singapore, the company is partnering with sustainability-focused data center firm DayOne to set up a smaller prototype facility at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine at the National University of Singapore. The center will house a single rack of 20 CL1 units and serve as an “initial validation phase.â€

There are also plans to eventually deploy the technology in a commercial DayOne data center and test it under real-world conditions. The phased expansion could eventually scale up to deploy as many as 1,000 CL1 units at a DayOne facility.

Cortical Labs and DayOne did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Gizmodo.