About
Trevor McCourt is a pioneering physicist-engineer and co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Extropic, a breakthrough startup developing thermodynamic computing hardware that harnesses noise and probabilistic physics to accelerate generative AI with dramatically higher energy efficiency—potentially thousands of times better than traditional GPUs—addressing the escalating power constraints limiting AI scaling. With a background in mechanical engineering from the University of Waterloo and advanced research at MIT in quantum control, metrology, and information applied to superconducting and trapped-ion systems, McCourt previously contributed to cutting-edge projects at Alphabet's X (Google Quantum AI) and other roles in quantum programming and hardware. Co-founding Extropic in 2022 alongside CEO Guillaume Verdon, he has guided the company through a $14.1 million seed round and the 2025 unveiling of its first working Thermodynamic Sampling Units (TSUs), positioning thermodynamic paradigms as a post-Moore's Law frontier for probabilistic machine learning and ushering in a new era of physics-native AI acceleration.