energy-efficient-computing
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The Thousand-Core Chip That Outlived Its Maker
Esperanto built a low-power RISC-V processor for AI, then a whole server and software stack to make it useful. In 2025 the company closed; the architecture found another home.
Mihai Raneti Kept a Spreadsheet of 1,213 Noes. Then He Built Toward a Brain on a Chip.
The CyberSwarm founder turned failed ventures, 16,000 emails and an unfashionable bet on analog hardware into a patient campaign to make AI learn locally, with less energy and no cloud required.
Zaijun Chen
Zaijun Chen is a physicist-turned-founder building light-powered computers for artificial intelligence. As co-founder and CEO of Opticore, he is developing photonic optical processing units (OPUs) that the company says are up to 100x more energy efficient and 25x denser than leading GPUs. Trained at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and MIT, and now director of the Laboratory of Intelligent and Quantum Photonics at USC, Chen turned a decade of precision-optics research into a venture-backed bet that the future of AI compute runs on photons instead of electrons.
Lightmatter
Lightmatter is building a photonic supercomputer. The Mountain View company uses light, not electrons, to move data between AI chips - tackling the bandwidth and energy wall that's about to crash into the next generation of data centers. Its Passage interconnect and Envise processor aim to connect millions of chips at the speed of light.