At Cortical Labs' Melbourne data centre, each working day starts with an unusual ritual. Technicians begin their morning by topping up biological computers with a liquid modelled on the cerebrospinal fluid that cushions the human brain. This is the practical reality of running a facility powered by lab-grown neurons rather than silicon chips.
The Australian biotech company has now opened its biological computing infrastructure to external researchers through a cloud service. The company racked and stacked 120 CL1 units and created an API and interface that allows users to create a Jupyter Notebook or upload python code, and have it run on a biological computer. Users can access the system via credit card, much like conventional cloud services, though the similarities end there.
The maintenance overhead explains why biological computing remains in its infancy. Cortical Labs CEO and founder Hon Weng Chong told The Register that "We remove the fluid every 24 hours" because the living neurons deplete the level of oxygen and glucose in the liquid. Technicians also adjust the mixture of gases in the computers; the company adds nitrogen and carbon dioxide so the atmosphere around its computers comprises around five percent oxygen—prime conditions for biological computers to operate.
What makes this effort worthwhile, according to Chong, is the potential performance advantage. The neurons in biological computers can learn about the simulated environments they inhabit and devise novel approaches to challenges they face within them, and can do that faster than classical computers, create original ideas instead of regurgitating and re-ordering information like LLMs, and do it all while using less energy than conventional datacentres.
Early users are likely to be research institutions rather than mainstream businesses. Early users of the cloud will either be scientific labs that can't run their own CL1, or organisations that have unusual computing needs and decide to explore biological computing so they develop experience in the technology before more practical services become available. Chong said he hopes early customers will be the kind of organisations, such as an Australian bank making very early investments in quantum computers, that are willing to dabble with Cortical's cloud.
The immediate barrier to wider adoption is the substantial infrastructure and expertise required to keep biological systems alive. To use a CL1, you'll need to choose a line of cells with genetic traits suited to a particular computing job, then do all that messing about with gases and peculiar fluids to prep the machine for work. Chong hopes automation will one day remove the need for messy work with fluids and gases, though for now he is content to have a colleague get hands-on with CL1 units every day because he thinks users will tolerate that.
The science underpinning the technology emerged from a 2022 paper describing how researchers placed a biological neural network composed of human and rodent stem cells on high-density multielectrode arrays. The CL1 was announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on 2 March 2025 as a self-contained biological computer with a system that integrates lab-grown human neurons on an electrode array within a housing that includes an internal life-support system with pumps, gas mixing, temperature control, and filtration to keep the neurons alive for up to six months. Each unit is priced at approximately US$35,000, uses 850 to 1,000 watts of power, and does not require an external computer to operate.
The technology faces genuine scalability questions. Michael Barros of the University of Essex notes that while biological computers like the CL1 are being developed globally, they present significant construction challenges and lack widespread accessibility, commenting that "We spend a lot of money and sweat to build these systems," though he believes Cortical Labs' cloud initiative is groundbreaking. However, Tjeerd olde Scheper from Oxford Brookes University, who has experience with a competing biological computing company, FinalSpark, cautioned that the technology is still in its nascent stages.
The company's longer-term vision is more ambitious. Cortical Labs has unveiled plans for two distinct data centres, with the Melbourne facility slated to feature approximately 120 CL1 units and a second centre, a collaboration with the National University of Singapore, initially housing 20 CL1 units, with plans to expand to 1000 units in a larger, purpose-built data centre pending regulatory approval.
For now, the biological cloud service represents an experiment in making a genuinely novel computing approach accessible to researchers who lack the resources or expertise to build their own systems. Whether the approach scales beyond research applications remains to be seen. The requirement for daily fluid replacement and gas adjustments suggests biological computing will remain a niche solution, at least until automation can reduce the operational burden that currently demands human attention at the start of every working day.