Sketchpad creator Ivan Sutherland and other experts say the US should seize the superconducting electronics opportunity, as CMOS chip making nears atomic limits
John Markoff / New York Times : Tweets: @nytimesbusiness , @vishalgulati_ , and @dealbook Tweets: @nytimesbusiness : “There is really the potential of creating the equivalent of the human brain using superconducting technology,” Elie Track of Hypres, a superconducting company, tells @Markoff. https://www.nytimes.com/... Vishal Gulati / @vishalgulati_ : Ivan Sutherland played a key role in foundational computer technologies. Now he sees a path for America to claim the mantle in “superconducting” chips. https://www.nytimes.com/... @dealbook : Dr. Ivan Sutherland was instrumental decades ago in helping to create today's dominant approach to making computer chips. Today he is arguing that the U.S. is failing at a crucial time to consider alternative chip-making technologies. https://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This call lands at the end of an arc the coverage has been tracing for years: engineers have been hunting for alternatives since Moore's Law began visibly slowing, and capital followed — semiconductor startups drew more than $12B in equity in 2020 alone, up eightfold since 2016. What has changed since then is that US policy went all-in on the incumbent technology, with 50+ fab projects announced since the CHIPS Act.
The significance of the Sutherland-Track argument is timing: Washington is committing hundreds of billions to CMOS-era capacity (~$200B in proposed projects per the SIA) just as its most credentialed pioneers argue the underlying transistor roadmap is nearing atomic limits — meaning the US could lock in leadership of a technology approaching its ceiling.
First-order effects
- US policymakers now face an explicit fork: the CHIPS Act buildout is CMOS-centric, while Sutherland, Elie Track of Hypres and other experts are pressing for federal investment in superconducting electronics as a parallel track.
- Hypres and other superconducting companies gain a policy platform from Sutherland's stature — Track's claim that superconducting tech could approach brain-equivalent computing gives the field a concrete pitch to legislators.
Second-order effects
- Superconducting electronics would compete for the same scarce engineering talent as the CHIPS Act fabs, sharpening the worker shortage officials already fear as 50+ projects come online.
- The venture capital wave behind the $12B startup surge gains a new frontier: if government signals interest in post-CMOS tech, investors who backed incremental semiconductor ideas may redirect toward exotic-computing bets.
Third-order effects
- If CMOS really does hit atomic limits while US capital is concentrated in conventional fabs, national compute leadership could hinge on which country industrializes a successor technology first — making superconducting research a matter of strategic positioning rather than academic curiosity.
- A pattern of government funding chasing both incumbent scale-up and next-architecture research would mark the end of one-technology eras in chips, where policy hedges across architectures instead of standardizing on a single roadmap.
The trend: As CMOS scaling approaches physical limits, chip strategy is splitting between maximizing the incumbent fab ecosystem and seeding successor architectures like superconducting electronics, with governments increasingly forced to fund both.