Computers Made With Living Brain Cells Are Real

In 2022, a team of Australian researchers got a dish of living brain cells to play Pong. It sounds like a stunt, but it set off one of the strangest areas of computing research today.

The experiment, published in the journal Neuron, used about 800,000 brain cells grown on a microelectrode array that could both stimulate them and read their activity. The system was called DishBrain. Feedback from the electrodes taught it to return the ball, by making the cells act as if they themselves were the paddle. The cells weren’t a gamer’s dream. They never got that good at Pong, but they improved, and that was the point.

How do you plug a computer into neurons?

The idea is simpler than it sounds. Neurons communicate with small electrical pulses, so researchers put them on a chip covered in tiny electrodes. The electrodes send in signals that stand for information, then read how the cells respond.

The human cells aren’t taken from a brain. They’re reprogrammed from skin or blood samples donated by adult volunteers. A life-support system then feeds them nutrients, controls temperature and filters waste so they stay alive.

That system is now a product. Cortical Labs’ CL1, which debuted in 2025, is sold as a code-deployable biological computer, intended mainly for neuroscience and biotech research, not for your next laptop.

Why energy is the big draw

If you’ve ever wondered what powers the AI tools you use for assignments, the answer is a lot of electricity. Data centres running AI workloads need tens of kilowatts, while a rack of CL1 units consumes roughly 850 to 1,000 watts. Cortical Labs puts a single CL1 at about 25 watts, closer to a bright light bulb than a server.

There’s a catch, though. A CL1 rack isn’t doing the same job as an AI data centre, so the comparison isn’t like for like. The Straits Times reported that Cortical Labs’ CEO sees traditional silicon as better suited to the fast, precise and repeatable calculations behind large language models. The pitch is that biology could complement silicon, not replace it.

From dish to data centre

This year the idea moved out of the lab. DayOne Data Centers launched Singapore’s first Biological Data Center Prototype with Cortical Labs and NUS Medicine, a 20-unit CL1 system described as the first independently operated biologically integrated server rack in the world. At about 800,000 neurons per unit, one report estimated the rack at roughly 16 million neurons, about the same as a frog’s brain. The human brain, by comparison, has around 86 billion.

So we’re a very long way from a brain-sized computer.

The medicine angle

The most immediate use may be medical. Researchers can grow neurons from different donors and see how they respond to drugs. Cortical Labs’ chief scientific officer has noted that neuropsychiatric drugs have some of the highest failure rates in clinical trials, partly because the usual lab models don’t capture how brain cells process information in real time. In one epilepsy test, the CL1 restored function in impaired neural cultures.

So, could these things think?

This is the question everyone asks, and the honest answer is that nobody knows where the line is. The DishBrain researchers said the culture is too primitive to be conscious, but they also described the result as something that resembles intelligence. Neuroscientist Karl Friston called the technology a little “brain in a vat” for experiments, something philosophers have been discussing for decades.

The practical safeguards are modest but real. Cortical Labs requires customers to secure ethical approval to generate cell lines, and buyers of physical units need a suitable cell culture lab. Whether that’s enough is likely to be debated as the cultures get larger and more capable.

Why students should pay attention

Biocomputing sits where neuroscience, computer science, electronics and ethics meet. If you’re studying any of those, it’s a good example of a field that doesn’t fit one subject. It’s also a ready-made essay topic: if a culture of neurons can learn, what do we owe it?

For now, your laptop is safe. But the idea that a computer might one day be partly alive isn’t science fiction anymore. It’s a prototype rack in Singapore.