Cortical Labs unveils the CL1, a commercial computer built on human neurons

Filed retrospectively. Before the Specola kept its nightly watch, these were the observations that turned the telescope.

At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in early March 2025, the Australian company Cortical Labs presented the CL1, which it described as the first commercially available biological computer. The system grows roughly 800,000 living human neurons, reprogrammed from adult donor skin or blood samples, across a silicon electrode array, and reads and stimulates their activity through sub-millisecond feedback loops. The neurons sit inside a life-support unit that regulates temperature and filters waste, keeping the cells viable for up to six months. Each unit was priced at about 35,000 US dollars.

Cortical Labs positioned the CL1 for research in drug discovery, disease modeling, robotics, and energy-efficient computing. The company said it planned to bring server racks of the units online for cloud access later in 2025. Its chief executive Hon Weng Chong told Forbes that “the only thing that we know of that actually has true intelligence is the brain.”

The CL1 followed the company’s 2022 DishBrain work, in which cultured neurons learned a game of Pong. It replaced that earlier setup with a stable planar array and a Python interface intended to let researchers without a biology background program the wetware directly. The launch marked the point at which neuron-based computing moved from laboratory demonstration to a listed product.