Programming news · January 2026
Communications of the ACM profiles reversible computing as an energy fix for AI
“The Future is Reversible” lays out, for a broad computing audience, how every conventional operation loses some information as heat, and how Charles Bennett's idea of systems that uncompute — undoing functions after they run — points to a way around that loss.
The article frames AI's heavily parallel, memory-hungry workloads as an ideal target for reversible processors, since the energy saved scales with the enormous number of operations involved. It connects decades of theory to the current commercial push embodied by startups building adiabatic, energy-recovery silicon.
Appearing in ACM's flagship magazine signals that reversible computing has moved from a niche curiosity to a mainstream candidate solution for sustainable computing.