Mushrooms might replace microchips: the fungal future of computing

In a small research lab, piles of edible mushrooms once destined for the compost heap found themselves wired directly into electronic circuits. The surprising reason: scientists wanted to turn them into memory devices. A report published via The Ohio State University outlines how common fungi such as shiitake and button mushrooms were dehydrated, wired, and used as organic memristors — components that can remember past electrical states, much like the memory chips in your phone or laptop.

The study found that mushroom-based memristors could switch between electrical states at up to ~5,850 signals per second with about 90% accuracy. Because fungal networks have inherently different physical and electrical characteristics compared to silicon, the hope is that they may open up a path toward more sustainable, energy-efficient computing hardware. The research team described this as part of a broader push into bioelectronics — devices that blend biology and technology.

Beyond raw capability, mushrooms offer advantages in manufacturing and materials. Standard semiconductor chips rely on rare earth elements, high-energy processes, and complex fabrication. The fungal approach, conversely, uses a biodegradable substrate and could, potentially, result in lower costs and less waste.

Computing devices are entering a saturation phase where raw performance gains from shrinking transistors are hitting physical limits. Meanwhile, environmental concerns and material scarcity are driving researchers to seek new paradigms. In this landscape, living or organic electronics present an alluring alternative. The mushroom memristor work sits at the intersection of several trends: neuromorphic computing (hardware mimicking brain-style operations), sustainable design, and unconventional materials.

Furthermore, this isn’t just a quirky novelty. Past work has already explored fungal networks as components of logic circuits and even ‘living motherboards’. For example, a 2023 project by University of the West of England used mycelium networks as wiring and logic gates, hinting early on at the potential of fungi as computing substrates.

That said, the mushroom memory devices are very much at early-stage research. The speed and reliability still lag far behind mainstream silicon chips, and miniaturisation remains a big obstacle: the research acknowledges that viable fungal memristors “would need to be far smaller” than the lab versions.

There are also questions of durability, integration, and lifecycle. A memory chip made of dehydrated mushroom tissue may behave differently in temperature extremes, long-term stability or in consumer-grade manufacturing processes. And while the materials are biodegradable, how would they fare in a high-performance computing environment?

The idea of a computer memory chip grown from mushrooms may sound like sci-fi, yet the underlying research is real and provocative. While we’re not about to discard silicon any time soon, these early results suggest a future where electronics borrow more from nature. If fungi can be trained, wired and turned into memory devices, what else could we grow? In many ways this is a turning point: computing hardware moving from purely synthetic to partly biological. For the tech industry, the question is no longer “how fast can we make it?” but increasingly “what materials and paradigms should we be using?”.

As sustainable computing becomes more pressing, the mushrooms in that lab might just be prototypes of a very different kind of hardware revolution.