MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of science and technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here.

On the evening of December 29, 1959, at an American Physical Society meeting at Caltech, the physicist Richard Feynman gave a lecture called “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” on how we might manipulate and control things on an extremely small scale. There is no physical law stopping us from writing the entire Encyclopædia Britannica on the head of a pin, he argued, or from storing every book ever written in something the size of a dust speck—or, ultimately, from arranging matter atom by atom. Biology already did versions of this (a living cell keeps its instructions in a wisp of DNA), so all of this was plainly permitted by the laws of physics. We simply had not built the tools yet.

In other words, there was plenty of room at the bottom. He was right, and for decades we descended into that space almost for free. The transistor—the switch at the heart of computer chips—repeatedly halved in size so that chips doubled in density; a computer that once filled a room now fits inside a watch. But that easy descent has now stalled, and the clearest sign is the buildout of data centers. Six of the biggest hyperscalers, the companies that run the world’s largest such facilities, are on track to spend more than $700 billion this year on computing infrastructure, about twice the record they set in 2025, pouring concrete and copper and silicon into new sites faster than the electrical grid can feed them.

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