This start-up founder is teaching chips how to recycle (their energy) | MIT Technology Review

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Skip to ContentMIT Technology ReviewFeaturedTopicsNewslettersEventsAudioMIT Technology ReviewFeaturedTopicsNewslettersEventsAudio2026 Innovators Under 35View all the innovatorsComputing and roboticsThis founder is teaching chips how to recycle (their energy)Hannah Earley wants to bring an old idea about creating energy-efficient computers into the mainstream.
By Eshan Raularchive pageSeptember 8, 2026Age:31Affiliation:Vaire ComputingRACHEL BUJALSKI Throughout the history of the computer chip, engineers have treated waste heat as an inevitable cost of a calculation. Hannah Earley, however, thinks it’s a design choice. Earley, 31, is cofounder and chief technology officer of Vaire Computing, a startup building chips that recycle energy usually thrown away as heat—a strategy known as reversible computing. Ultimately, she thinks, this approach could help make data centers (and our laptops and phones) much more energy efficient.  When conventional computer chips perform calculations, they erase the information they no longer need along the way, dissipating energy as heat in the process. Earley compares the approach to racing through a city only to pump the brakes at every intersection: The car loses momentum and must burn more fuel to accelerate again. Reversible computing aims to keep the momentum going—instead of erasing information from the intermediate steps in a calculation, the circuit retains it, making it possible to run the computation backward and recover some of the energy. While the idea was first proposed more than 50 years ago, it proved impractical to implement with existing transistors and circuits. Earley, though, has completely rethought the hardware needed to make energy recovery work. She designed a patent-pending type of resonator—a microscopic chip component that stores recovered energy for later reuse. “It’s really a glorified pendulum,” she says. Last year, Vaire announced a key breakthrough: a chip with a resonator that recovered more energy than it lost, even after the energy needed to power the component was taken into account. For a subfield that has existed mostly in theory, the result was proof of life. “It’s clear they have something interesting,” says Igor Markov, a researcher in electronic design automation and a former professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Still, he says, the technology is quite early stage; the company will need “a series of increasingly realistic and convincing demonstrations to attract the industry support needed for commercialization.” 
She gradually became convinced that the connection between information, energy, and heat could change computers forever. Earley’s journey into chip design started sooner than most. She began programming around the age of nine, starting with high-level coding for the web before digging into other programming languages like Perl and Java. She continued progressing to more and more abstract layers of computing, until she got all the way down to transistors. She eventually enrolled in a PhD program at the University of Cambridge under the computational biologist Gos Micklem. She started out studying how materials such as DNA could be used to perform calculations, but a few months in, Micklem sent her the 1999 PhD thesis of Michael Frank, a pioneer in reversible computing. Earley read it once, felt skeptical, read it again, and sat with it for a few weeks. She gradually became convinced that the connection between information, energy, and heat could change computers forever.
Related StoryPsiQuantum has a plan to make a massive quantum computer out of lightRead nextThe fascination completely redirected her PhD work. Earley studied the physical limits of computation and built software that could turn ordinary programs into reversible ones. “Eventually I wouldn’t let her put my name on any of her papers, because I felt that I couldn’t really stand up and give a proper talk about them,” Micklem recalls. “It was her stuff.” After completing her degree in 2021, Earley met Rodolfo Rosini, a technology entrepreneur and investor. The pair cofounded Vaire that same year, and the company has since raised more than $12 million, hired Frank as a senior scientist, and begun turning the vision of reversible computing into real hardware. Innovation, however, doesn’t happen overnight. During the winter of 2022 in Grinnell, Iowa, Earley spent weeks in her now-wife’s basement apartment as the wind chill outside reached roughly −40 °F, covering a whiteboard over and over again with schematics for the core piece of circuitry needed to make reversible logic work. By the time the design finally came together, after the couple had escaped the cold for Las Vegas, it felt less like an aha moment and more like a gradual wave of relief. “I’m not completely out of my depth,” she remembers feeling.  Earley and her colleagues’ next challenge is making their drastically different chip fit into familiar devices and manufacturing systems. She believes that’s where the future lies—not in further refining existing chips but in rebuilding them from the ground up with an eye toward reversibility. “I want to tackle every part of how computers are built,” Earley says, “and rethink it in these terms.”  by Eshan RaulShareShare story on linkedinShare story on facebookShare story on emailPopularA fundamental flaw leaves LLMs strikingly vulnerable to attackWill Douglas HeavenAnthropic found a hidden space where Claude puzzles over conceptsWill Douglas HeavenSperm donors need limits, says a European fertility groupJessica HamzelouAI is more likely than humans to form biases when hiringMichelle KimKeep ReadingMost PopularA fundamental flaw leaves LLMs strikingly vulnerable to attackIt makes it easy to trick them into doing things they shouldn’t, such as telling you how to sabotage an aircraft’s navigation system.
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Hannah Earley, cofounder and chief technology officer of Vaire Computing, is pursuing a strategy known as reversible computing, aiming to make data centers and personal devices significantly more energy efficient by recycling the energy typically lost as heat from computer chip calculations. This approach stems from the philosophy that waste heat should be treated as a design choice rather than an inevitable cost. Conventional computer chips dissipate energy as heat because they erase information in intermediate computational steps, similar to braking repeatedly during travel, which necessitates further fuel expenditure for subsequent acceleration. Reversible computing seeks to maintain momentum by ensuring that information is not erased during computation, allowing the circuit to retain information from intermediate steps and enabling the recovery of some of the dissipated energy.

To realize this concept, Earley developed novel hardware components, including a patent-pending type of resonator, which functions as a microscopic chip component designed specifically to store recovered energy for later reuse. A crucial breakthrough was announced by Vaire last year, demonstrating a chip with such a resonator that successfully recovered more energy than it lost, even accounting for the energy required to power the component itself. While this proof of concept has been achieved, researchers acknowledge that the technology is still in an early stage and requires further realistic demonstrations to secure the industry support necessary for commercialization.

Earley's intellectual journey into this field was multifaceted, starting with an early interest in programming and progressing through abstract computing layers down to the level of transistors. Her studies included exploring how materials like DNA could perform calculations. A pivotal influence came from studying the 1999 doctoral thesis of Michael Frank, a pioneer in reversible computing, which solidified her conviction that the interplay between information, energy, and heat could fundamentally transform computing. After completing her PhD at the University of Cambridge, Earley cofounded Vaire Computing with Rodolfo Rosini in 2021, embarking on the mission to translate this vision into tangible hardware. The development process involved intensive design work, where schematics for the core circuitry were developed through sustained effort focusing on reversible logic. The immediate future for her and her team involves tackling the challenge of integrating these novel chips into existing devices and manufacturing systems, believing that true innovation lies in rebuilding computer architecture from the ground up with reversibility as a core principle.