Singapore switches on first server rack powered by human neurons: 20 kW to keep them alive

On August 6, NUS Medicine, data center operator DayOne, and Australia's Cortical Labs showed around eighty invited guests, in Singapore, a rack of twenty CL1 units. These are computers that run computations relying on living human neurons. The partners describe it as the first independently operated, biologically integrated server rack. The cells are grown from stem cells at the Life Sciences Institute of the National University of Singapore.

The project is justified on electricity grounds. Biological computing is presented as a way to scale artificial intelligence capacity using a fraction of the power that silicon servers require. The announcement, however, is not backed by any figures. The specification sheet published by Cortical Labs lists a single CL1 unit as drawing between 850 and 1,000 watts, which puts the Singapore rack at 20 kilowatts.

Consumption that measures survival, not activity

Twenty kilowatts is an ordinary figure: a conventional data center rack sits in the same range. The difference lies in how the power is used. In a machine like the CL1, electricity does not power the computation, but incubators, pumps and temperature control systems, everything that keeps the cells from dying. The declared consumption therefore reflects the survival of the culture, not its computing activity.

The most striking figures in the sector belong to another company: Switzerland's FinalSpark, which runs a remote platform of sixteen brain organoids from Vevey, claims a consumption for its biological processors roughly a million times lower than digital chips.

Europe is pursuing the same goal while staying with silicon. In the Netherlands, a neuromorphic computing hub is taking shape, built around chips that mimic neuron behavior without needing to be fed.

Cortical Labs is aiming more at customers than at scientific publications. Founder Hon Weng Chong says the prototype "sposta la conversazione dalla ricerca all'applicazione commerciale" (shifts the conversation from research to commercial application), and points to drug discovery, humanoid robotics, cybersecurity and fraud detection as possible applications.

The CL1's life-support system keeps neurons alive for up to six months, a maintenance deadline no silicon rack has to schedule. The figure that would settle the question, consumption per unit of useful work, has not been published by anyone so far.