Maybe that'll be the first way, but there's nothing special about biology.
Remember, we don't have a rigorous definition of things like life, intelligence, and consciousness. We are narrowing it down and making progress, but we aren't there (some people confuse this with a "moving goalpost" but of course "it moves", because when we get closer we have better resolution as to what we're trying to figure out. It'd be a "moving goalpost" in the classic sense if we had a well defined definition and then updated in response to make something not work, specifically in a way that is inconsistent with the previous goalpost. As opposed to being more refined)
Somehow I doubt that organic cells (structures optimized for independent operation and reproduction, then adapted to work semi-cooperatively) resemble optimal compute fabric for cognition. By that same token I doubt that optimal compute fabric for cognition resembles GPUs or CPUs as we understand them today. I would expect whatever this efficient design is to be extremely unlikely to occur naturally, structurally, and involve some very exotic manufactured materials.
Remember, we don't have a rigorous definition of things like life, intelligence, and consciousness. We are narrowing it down and making progress, but we aren't there (some people confuse this with a "moving goalpost" but of course "it moves", because when we get closer we have better resolution as to what we're trying to figure out. It'd be a "moving goalpost" in the classic sense if we had a well defined definition and then updated in response to make something not work, specifically in a way that is inconsistent with the previous goalpost. As opposed to being more refined)