Hannah Earley, 31, cofounder and CTO of Vaire Computing, is developing chips that recycle energy usually lost as heat. Conventional chips erase information during calculations, dissipating energy as heat. Earley's approach, reversible computing, retains intermediate data to recover energy.

She designed a patent-pending resonator, a microscopic component that stores recovered energy. Last year, Vaire announced a breakthrough: a chip that recovered more energy than it lost. While the technology remains early stage, researchers like Igor Markov acknowledge the potential.

Earley's interest began during her PhD at Cambridge under Gos Micklem, where she studied reversible computing's potential to change computers forever. After cofounding Vaire in 2021 with Rodolfo Rosini, the company raised over $12 million and hired Michael Frank as a senior scientist. Despite challenges, Earley believes this approach could make data centers, laptops, and phones significantly more energy efficient.