Vaire Computing CEO Rodolfo Rosini on energy-efficient AI and Britain's manufacturing bottleneck

Rodolfo Rosini, co-founder and CEO of Vaire Computing, joins Tom and Calum to make the case that the future of computing has to run in reverse. A conventional chip gets hot because it throws information away, dumping each transistor's charge to ground. Vaire's chips store that charge and send it back, like a pendulum. That trick could keep the computing curve climbing long after Moore's law runs out of road, at the moment AI's appetite for energy is exploding.

Rodolfo explains how he found the problem, spent three years in stealth recruiting the field before anyone noticed it existed, and built the first end-to-end reversible chip at a cost of several years of life expectancy. He then turns to why making chips may be the hardest thing humanity does, and to what Britain gets wrong about founders, family wealth and Arm.

The episode explores:

• Orphan problems, Mads Mikkelsen, and how Vaire started on a Wikipedia page
• Three years in stealth hoovering up the people behind reversible computing at Arm, Intel, Cambridge and Sandia
• Why a chip gets hot from forgetting, not from thinking
• The pendulum, the LC tank and the 2025 test chip that shaved years off its founder's life
• Why building chips may be the hardest thing humanity does, and what SpaceX's rockets have to do with it
• The Tesla strategy: a Lotus body with an electric engine
• The $225 billion inference market and the $150 million ticket to the dance
• Arm, Intel, IBM and why licensing is what you do after failing
• Brighton summers, a spreadsheet of cities, and why London has no number two
• The First World War's cost in high-agency people, Sweden's billionaires, and what British socialism got wrong
• "We didn't lose Arm. We created the conditions to push it out."
• Letting Sainsbury's automate, and tackling poverty rather than inequality
• Batteryless supercomputers, neural Minecraft, and robots with a chip in every finger
• Tom's permanent semi-darkness, a German theory of the Industrial Revolution, and East London's phone snatchers

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