This winter the Americans will see a price hike in their electricity bill – not because of any issues related to energy generation but rather because of the rapidly increasing energy demand by the Data Centers.   Energy efficiency is becoming critical not only to maintain the incessant advanced march of computing, but also to ensure that electronics does not become a drag on the finite energy resources of the world. This will need a radical rethinking of the basic building blocks that constitute the electronic hardware. In this talk, I shall briefly present how exploiting physics and functional materials to augment CMOS may offer a new pathway for energy efficiency. In particular, I shall discuss logic, memory, and backend technologies where we have achieved record performance by combining ultrathin ferroelectric materials with CMOS. These examples underscore how functional augmentation of CMOS by harnessing new materials could offer opportunities that are otherwise not available through conventional means.