Batch workloads are where cloud spend gets wasted most spectacularly, and tooling that fixes it sells easily. That’s the commercial edge on an otherwise unglamorous category. Batch computing is permanent rather than fashionable. Jobs that run without anyone waiting: rendering, simulation, genomics pipelines, risk calculations, ETL, model training. It predates interactive computing and never went away. Every cloud provider sells a batch service, HPC centres run on the model, and the scheduling software behind it is a serious technical field with its own literature.

Investors in deep tech want names communicating their risk appetite. A fund reading is one of the strongest here. Moonshot became the standard word for a research programme aimed at something that might not work but would be transformative if it did, used by corporate research labs, government funding agencies and philanthropic science funders. Attached to computing it names the ambitious end of the field: quantum, neuromorphic, optical, novel architectures, and anything attempting a step change rather than an increment.