Mike Cannon-Brookes in Sydney, Australia.
Photographer: Lisa Maree Williams/BloombergA Software Billionaire Is Betting Big on a Wild Climate Fix
Mike Cannon-Brookes co-founded software giant Atlassian. Now, he’s bringing a technologist’s mindset to energy with an idea that could upend power grids around the world.
Moore’s Law says that the number of transistors crammed onto microchips will double every two years, magnifying computing power with a minimum cost increase. It’s been a key benchmark for technological progress since Intel Corporation co-founder Gordon Moore coined the rule in 1965.
The concept is instructive for Mike Cannon-Brookes, the billionaire co-founder of software giant Atlassian Corp. But that’s not the sector where it's most applicable. In his estimation, technology’s most important law applies to the radical transformation of the energy system in the coming decades.