Startup Vaire Computing Builds Chips That Recycle Wasted Energy

Hannah Earley, 31, is cofounder and chief technology officer of startup Vaire Computing, which is building computer chips designed around "reversible computing." The approach treats the heat wasted by ordinary chips as a design choice rather than an unavoidable cost.

Conventional chips erase the data from each intermediate step of a calculation once it is no longer needed, releasing that energy as heat. Earley compares this to a car braking at every intersection in a city, then burning fuel to build speed back up again. Reversible computing instead keeps the calculation's "momentum": the circuit retains intermediate data so the computation can run backward, recovering some of the energy that would otherwise be lost as heat.

The idea was first proposed more than 50 years ago but proved impractical to build with the transistors and circuits available at the time. Earley designed a patent-pending resonator — a microscopic chip component that stores recovered energy for reuse, which she describes as "a glorified pendulum." Last year, Vaire announced that a chip built with the resonator recovered more energy than it lost, even after accounting for the energy needed to power the component.

Igor Markov, a researcher in electronic design automation and a former professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, called the result "proof of life" for a subfield that had existed mostly in theory. "It's clear they have something interesting," he said. He cautioned that the technology is still early-stage, and that Vaire will need "a series of increasingly realistic and convincing demonstrations to attract the industry support needed for commercialization."

Vaire was cofounded in 2021 by Earley and technology entrepreneur Rodolfo Rosini, has raised more than $12 million, and has hired reversible-computing pioneer Michael Frank as a senior scientist.