Prof Sir Colin Humphries is leading a team of researchers from Queen Mary University of London with the University of Nottingham and the James Watt Nanofabrication Centre at the University of Glasgow, which is learning about 2D graphene semiconductors and developing atom-thick graphene chips.

He explained, in a piece for The Telegraph, how graphenes use raw materials entirely from the UK and are more efficient conductors. They can also be stacked into smaller space and don't need cooling in the way many data centres do, using much less water.

Writer, Ambrose Evans Pritchard comments "It promises a future where semiconductors are so energy efficient that we will have to recharge our mobile phones just once a week. A good laptop battery will run for 80 hours... Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and the giant hyper-scalers will not need extra fleets of nuclear reactors and gas plants to run their AI data centres."

"We expect to have a prototype that works by 2029, and we should be manufacturing millions of working devices by 2032-2033," Prof Humphries said.