The Question MIT Poses: How Far Can Computing Go?

The limits of computing are still far off. In an October 19, 2026 article titled "How far can we push computing?" MIT Technology Review argued that while growth has hit a ceiling in the approach of building ever-larger data centers—facilities packed with countless servers—ample headroom remains beneath the limits set by the laws of physics. Its central thesis: there is still plenty of room at the bottom.

The article begins with physicist Richard Feynman's 1959 lecture. In his talk "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," Feynman argued that extreme miniaturization—including engraving an entire encyclopedia on the head of a pin and arranging matter atom by atom—would not violate the laws of physics. He noted that biology already stores information in DNA within living cells. Feynman also lectured at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1965.

In the decades that followed, transistors repeatedly shrank to half their size, doubling chip density, and computers that once filled entire rooms shrank as well. Today's progress is driven by a scaling approach of cramming more chips into massive data centers. The six hyperscaler companies operating the world's largest data centers are expected to spend more than $700 billion on computing infrastructure this year—roughly double the record set in 2025.

Yet Moore's Law, which charted the density of transistors on silicon, has slowed, and the trend associated with Dennard scaling—which held that power consumption stays constant even as transistors shrink—is also in trouble. MIT Technology Review noted that as computing approaches the upper bound of what it can create, its future lies not in scaling up, but in the space below, at the limits of minuscule physics.