Japan has announced plans to start constructing the first ever "zeta-class" supercomputer next year. Once fully operational, it will be 1,000 times faster than today's most powerful supercomputers.

One of the biggest challenges engineers will face in building the new supercomputer is finding a way to make it run efficiently. In 2023, computer experts predicted that a zeta-class machine built using current supercomputer technologies would require the equivalent energy to the output of 21 nuclear power plants, computing news website HPCwire previously reported.