this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2024
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Resistive heating is not the dominant energy loss mechanism in modern computing. Since the advent of field effect transistors, switching losses dominate. Room temperature super conductors could be relevant in power generation, distribution, and manuafacturing, but would not radically alter the power requirements for computing.
I personally don't think any possible room temperature super conductors would be economical to produce at a large enough scale to make a large difference in energy demands. Researchers have pretty thoroughly investigated the classes of materials that are easy to manufacture, which suggests a room temperature superconductor would be prohibitevely expensive to produce.