Thirteen years after his landmark 2050 deep dive on the cognition-as-a-service economy, The Ledger’s Farrukh Delacroix returned to the cognitive infrastructure beat with a profile of Neuromorphic Foundries, the Leuven-based company that has spent five years building what the cognition-cluster rental model was designed to prevent: an offline, single-instance, locally-hosted neural core.
The Company
Sofie Van der Meulen co-founded Neuromorphic Foundries in 2058 with fellow imec alumnus Bram Coenraets, initially pursuing efficiency research in the tradition of the Volkonsky et al. (2055) sparse connectomic scaffold paper, which had by then “quietly reshaped how a small but growing minority of the field thought about connectomic density.”
The Kosmograd Problem
What changed the company’s direction, Van der Meulen stated without hesitation, was Kosmograd. The coverage of USTAV over the preceding years demonstrated something the commercial cluster industry had no interest in proving: a genuinely narrow, genuinely efficient cognitive system could run an entire settlement’s infrastructure on hardware dramatically smaller and less power-hungry than anything the commercial cluster operators had shipped.
Van der Meulen’s institutional critique was direct: “The cluster model is enormously profitable for the companies running it. Renting cognition by the query is a much better business than selling someone a box they only buy once. Efficiency research that threatens the rental model was never going to come from inside the companies built on the rental model. It was always going to have to come from somewhere that didn’t have that business to protect.”
This is the most direct public articulation of the structural conflict between commercial rent-extraction and architectural efficiency in the neural core industry. The implication — that the cognition-cluster business model had functioned as a brake on miniaturization research for over a decade — is the interview’s central analytical contribution.
The Hardware
The current-generation Neuromorphic Foundries core is roughly the volume of a small guest room, drawing power “somewhere between a commercial laundromat and a small manufacturing line” — well beyond residential electrical service, requiring dedicated industrial-grade infrastructure. The 2059 prototype had been larger: a dense lattice of sparse-topology connectomic hardware roughly the footprint of a master bedroom.
Van der Meulen was candid about the limitations: “We are not going to tell you this fits in your closet. It doesn’t. It’s not going to for a while yet, and I’d distrust anyone telling you otherwise.” But the achievement was independence from the query-metered cluster model — not portability. A university, a hospital system, a mid-sized municipal government, or a sufficiently dedicated private citizen could build and operate one.
The Open-Source Pivot
Neuromorphic Foundries released its core architecture and a baseline trained instance under an open license in early 2062. Within four months, a community had formed: cataloguing modifications, sharing training-curriculum variants, and — in a development the company neither authorized nor contested — publishing derivative instances on Hugging Face, several trained by enthusiasts who reported having independently sourced or fabricated compatible hardware.
Van der Meulen’s response to whether the company would crack down: “If a graduate student in a shared lab space or a very committed hobbyist manages to build one of these and trains their own instance and puts it up for anyone to download, I think that’s — look, I’m supposed to say something measured here about safety and standards, and those concerns are real, and I don’t dismiss them. But I’ll also tell you honestly: watching this thing escape the small number of companies that built the rental economy around it is the single most satisfying part of this entire five-year project, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise for a magazine profile.”
The open-source release and the community response represent the first documented instance of neural core technology escaping the institutional control of the commercial cluster operators and the licensing consortium — distributed, community-maintained, and beyond the reach of any single company’s governance framework.
The Trajectory
Asked whether a household-scale neural core is realistic in her lifetime, Van der Meulen paused for the first time in the interview: “Five years ago I’d have told you no, confidently. Two years ago I’d have told you I didn’t know. Today — I’ve stopped betting against this getting smaller. Kosmograd didn’t do the field a favor on purpose. But it proved a point we needed proven, and we’ve spent five years unable to stop thinking about it.”
The company operates independently of state defense funding and its architecture remains available under open license. Neuromorphic Foundries is in early conversation with institutional partners about further miniaturization — “the obvious next decade of this.”