China Just Built a Monkey Brain in Silicon

China has just rolled out the Darwin Monkey, the world’s largest neuromorphic supercomputer. The name alone sounds like the start of a bad sci-fi novel, but what sits inside is even stranger.

This isn’t the same as the AI most people know. ChatGPT, image generators, and the rest are built on huge models that chew through mountains of data and predict the next word or picture. They imitate intelligence, but they don’t think. Neuromorphic computing takes a very different path. Instead of copying the outputs of a brain, it tries to copy the process itself.

Darwin Monkey doesn’t line up neat calculations like a classical supercomputer. It fires in bursts of activity called spiking neural networks, the same way your neurons spark when you decide whether to cook dinner or order in. It is, in short, an attempt to make silicon act like grey matter.

The specs are wild. Darwin Monkey simulates 2 billion neurons and 100 billion synapses, powered by 960 brain-inspired chips. And it only needs about 2,000 watts, the same as a hairdryer. Imagine a brain the size of a small animal running on the cost of boiling your kettle.

Already it is showing hints of reasoning, problem solving and even creative generation. Scientists are testing it by simulating animal brains, from mice to zebrafish, which makes for an innocent headline before they inevitably plug in something much larger.

The impact is bigger than faster computing. For neuroscience, it means you can model brains without dissecting them. For AI, it means moving past today’s brute-force cloud farms. When you can build a thinking machine that runs on the power of a few kettles, everything changes.

And this is where the sci-fi comparisons stop sounding silly. Combine a neuromorphic system like Darwin Monkey with the physical body of a Tesla robot and you are no longer talking about scripts and routines. You are talking about machines that learn, adapt, behave and maybe even feel. The old films where astronauts explored deep space with a robot companion don’t look far-fetched anymore. They look like early concept sketches.

So yes, this is technically just another supercomputer. But unlike the AIs you know, it isn’t trying to mimic intelligence from the outside. It is building it from the inside. A monkey brain in silicon, edging us closer than ever to machines that don’t just act smart, but actually think.