Computing provides overwhelming benefits to the community and economy. FLEET’s mission has been to enable the continuing growth of computing, without that growth being ‘throttled’ by the availability and costs of energy.

The challenge has been to reduce the energy used in information and communication technology (ICT), which accounts for at least 8% of global electricity consumption and is doubling every decade.

The current, silicon-based technology (CMOS) is 60 years old and reaching the limits of its efficiency.

It is predicted that without a seismic shift in efficiency, global computing capacity will be strongly limited by energy in the next couple of decades.

Computing makes every other industry more sustainable, and is key to solving the largest future challenges.
If we want to use computers to better model the results of climate change, to create better drugs, and to better understand how viruses reproduce.

But without new technology that switches at much lower energy, we won’t be able to do these things. That’s where FLEET comes in.

Advances towards lower energy electronics include topological transistors and trapped excitons. While liquid-metal-based ‘spin off’ technologies discovered along the way promise other advances towards a more-sustainable future. (See the case study.)