Extropic AI

Extropic AI is a hardware company founded by Guillaume Verdon, the physicist and entrepreneur who created the e/acc (effective accelerationism) movement. The company is pursuing a fundamentally different approach to AI computation based on thermodynamic principles rather than traditional digital logic.

Extropic's core innovation is the Thermodynamic Sampling Unit (TSU), a chip that uses probabilistic bits (p-bits) instead of deterministic binary digits. Unlike conventional processors that fight against thermal noise, TSUs harness the natural randomness of physical systems to perform probabilistic computations more efficiently. In October 2025, Extropic unveiled the first working thermodynamic computing chip — a significant milestone in demonstrating that this unconventional approach can produce functional hardware.

If thermodynamic computing proves viable at scale, it could offer dramatic efficiency gains for AI workloads that are fundamentally probabilistic (such as sampling from language models, generative AI, and Monte Carlo simulations). Extropic represents one of the most ambitious bets in AI hardware — attempting to create an entirely new computing paradigm rather than incrementally improving existing GPU or ASIC architectures.