Why a startup is teaching human brain cells to play “Doom”

Mar 30th 2026|4 min read

In February Cortical Labs, an Australian startup, announced that a programmer had taught one of its “biological computers”—made of 200,000 human brain cells mounted on a silicon chip—to play “Doom”, a classic first-person shooter game. The firm had previously taught a collection of brain cells to play the much simpler “Pong”. Its ambitions are much bigger than video games, however. It hopes that neurons, packaged into super-efficient “biological computers” and slotted into racks at conventional data centres, might one day take their place alongside the transistor-packed chips of silicon that have defined conventional computing for the past half-century.