Second edition Watt Matters in AI Coming in November 2026!
The Conference
About Watt Matters in AI
The annual conference in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, on the energy cost of artificial intelligence and what’ it will take’s needed to change it.
The conference for the paradox of AI
Watt Matters in AI gathers innovators, chip designers, researchers, engineers, policymakers, and industry leaders to confront the central paradox of the AI era: the same technology promising breakthroughs in health, mobility, and the energy transition is itself becoming one of the fastest-growing loads on the global power grid. Computing already consumes a few percent of global electricity, and data-center demand is climbing by more than 10% per year, significantly faster than today’s efficiency gains can deliver.
Marginal improvements to existing architectures will not close that gap. The conference exists because making AI genuinely sustainable is a problem no single discipline, company, or country can solve alone; it requires hardware, algorithms, infrastructure, and regulation moving in the same direction, at the same time. This conference aims to advance this goal.
“The total energy used for computing is rising faster than efficiency improvements can compensate. This makes energy-efficient AI not just a technological question, but a societal one. Watt Matters in AI helped the attendees gain the knowledge needed to reach our common goal: more sustainable AI systems.”
— Hans Hilgenkamp, Chair, Watt Matters in AI
The Conference
What we explore
Every edition of Watt Matters in AI works across the full AI stack, from the physics of the chip to the policies that govern its use. The common thread is a search for paradigm shifts, ideas capable of delivering orders-of-magnitude improvements in energy efficiency rather than incremental tuning of what already exists. Recurring themes include neuromorphic and other brain-inspired computing, photonic and optical accelerators, spintronics and memory-centric architectures, approximate and physics-based computing, edge AI, and the data-center and high-performance-computing infrastructure that AI actually runs on today.
Alongside the hardware, the program consistently makes space for the software, policy, ethics, and geopolitical questions that decide whether any of these technologies ever reach scale. The mix is deliberate: hardware only matters if software can use it, algorithms only save energy if they are deployed widely, and regulation only works if it reflects what is physically and economically possible. Holding all of those perspectives in the same conversation is what the conference is designed to do.
How the conference is organized
Watt Matters in AI is organized by IO+, a Dutch independent media platform focusing on the people and organizations whose innovations are tackling the big problems of our time. The scientific content is shaped in close consultation with an independent advisory committee of researchers and engineers drawn from leading Dutch universities and research institutes, with the explicit aim of keeping the program high-quality, independent, and genuinely multidisciplinary.
The conference is hosted each year in Eindhoven, in the Brainport region, one of Europe’s densest concentrations of semiconductor, photonics, and deep-tech expertise. Each edition typically combines keynotes, parallel tracks on hardware, algorithms and policy, hands-on workshops, and extended time for networking, with English as the working language. In the run-up to each edition, IO+ publishes an ongoing article series on ioplus.nl covering the state of the field and the ideas the program will address.
Contact
Get in touch
For questions about the conference, partnership, or press inquiries, or to propose a topic or speaker for a future edition, email [email protected] or follow us on LinkedIn for updates between editions.