How CERN Runs Ultra-Compact AI on FPGAs to Filter 40 Million Collisions Per Second Every second, the Large Hadron Collider smashes protons together 40 million times. Each collision produces a blizzard of subatomic debris — and buried somewhere in that noise might be a Higgs boson decay, a hint of dark matter, or a particle that rewrites physics entirely. The catch? There is no storage system on Earth that could record all of it. CERN’s answer is one of the most impressive deployments of AI in any scientific field: ultra-compact neural networks running on FPGAs, making life-or-death filtering decisions in under one microsecond, in real time, on custom silicon. ...