Invest in PsiQuantum

Practically speaking, this means large calculations that would take decades or centuries to complete using even modern supercomputers can be performed in minutes on a quantum machine, leading to dramatic breakthroughs in chemistry, biology, and other scientific fields.

“By the time you get to 80 qubits, you are in a place where the qubits are storing more information than the total number of atoms in the entire universe,” said Samir Kumar, general manager of Microsoft’s venture capital arm, which has invested in PsiQuantum.

The company is already looking ahead to the problems that quantum computing may be able to solve, from calculating which catalyst for carbon sequestration can best slow climate change to mapping more efficient ways to fertilize crops and feed an ever-growing population.

PsiQuantum believes that the journey towards a useful quantum computer won't be realized by the traditional method of building a quantum computer through gradual increments in raw qubit counts and will take too long. PsiQuantum also believes the only way to create such a machine is to manufacture it in a semiconductor foundry. As a result, PsiQuantum established its goal to build a million-qubit, fault-tolerant photonic quantum computer.

The company has developed a resolute technical roadmap that centers on overcoming all the challenges that stand in the way of achieving a quantum machine with 1 million-plus qubits, right from the start. PsiQuantum is taking an existing scalable process and working to make it quantum, rather than taking a novel quantum process and working to make it scale.

“Quantum computing is the most profoundly world-changing technology uncovered to date,” said Jeremy O'Brien, CEO and Co-Founder of PsiQuantum. “It is my conviction that the way to bring this technology into reality is by using photonics. Our company was founded on the understanding that leveraging semiconductor manufacturing is the only way to deliver the million qubits that are known to be required for error correction, a prerequisite for commercially valuable quantum computing applications.”

PsiQuantum was founded in 2016 by the world’s foremost quantum computing experts, who understood that a useful quantum computer required fault-tolerance and error correction, and therefore at least 1 million physical qubits.

The company includes a growing team of world-class engineers and scientists who are working on the entire quantum computing stack, from the photonic and electronic chips, through packaging and control electronics, cryogenic systems, quantum architecture and fault tolerance, to quantum applications.

PsiQuantum’s approach to building a large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer involves a photonics-based architecture that enables manufacturing in a conventional silicon chip foundry.

Since its founding, PsiQuantum has hired more than 200 people to help try to develop what’s known as a silicon photonic quantum computer—essentially, a computer that runs on light.

Scalability stands as a significant benefit that sets silicon photonics apart from alternative quantum computing methods, and PsiQuantum's architecture capitalizes on this edge.

PsiQuantum chose to use photons to build its quantum computer for several reasons: (1) Photons do not feel heat and most photonic components operate at room temperature, (2) PsiQuantum’s superconducting quantum photon detectors require cooling but operate at a temperature around 100 times hotter than superconducting qubits, (3) Photonic qubits are compatible with fiber-optic networks, making it easy to route photons between local devices, (4) Photons aren’t affected by electromagnetic interference, (5) Photons have the ability to maintain quantum states for a relatively long time.

PsiQuantum struck a deal with GlobalFoundries, one of the world’s top chipmakers, in May 2021 to build its quantum chips at GlobalFoundries’ manufacturing facilities. GlobalFoundries has already started producing early versions of PsiQuantum’s chips using its standard manufacturing facilities.

This manufacturing process produces 300-millimeter wafers containing thousands of single photon sources and a corresponding number of single photon detectors. The wafer also contains interferometers, splitters, and phase shifters. In order to control the photonic chip, advanced electronic CMOS control chips with around 750 million transistors were also built at the GlobalFoundries facility in Dresden, Germany.

PsiQuantum is now building quantum chips alongside laptops and cell phone chips on GlobalFoundries’ 300-millimeter platform.

GlobalFoundries is a high-quality, premiere fab and only one of the three tier-one foundries worldwide. GlobalFoundries sells chips to more than 250 customers globally, including the U.S. Defense Department and companies such as Qualcomm, Broadcom, Bosch, and Intel.

This partnership marks a significant contrast with other quantum experiments, which rely on exotic materials and custom manufacturing.

PsiQuantum’s semiconductor roadmap only has a few remaining items to complete. Since a million qubits won’t fit on a single chip, the quantum computer will require multiple quantum processor chips to be interconnected with optical fibers and facilitated by ultra-high-performance optical switches to allow teleportation and entanglement of single photon operations between chips.

PsiQuantum has a sizable list of patents ranging from novel materials to photonic operations. “We’ve been patenting our work since the founding of the company, patenting across the entire technical spectrum, all the way to basic semiconductor processing to materials development up to quantum algorithms and everything in between—packaging, devices, photonics, CMOS electronics, cryogenic systems, error correcting codes,” said Dr. Pete Shadbolt, Chief Scientific Officer & Co-Founder of PsiQuantum.

PsiQuantum secures funding from venture capital firms, private investors, government grants, and strategic partnerships to support its research and development efforts.

Once PsiQuantum's quantum computing technology reaches a certain level of maturity, the company will likely focus on creating and commercializing specific quantum applications.

In April 2024, PsiQuantum secured $620 million from the Australian and Queensland governments to build the world’s first massive quantum computer there by the end of 2027. PsiQuantum says the investment makes it the most heavily-funded quantum computing startup in the world. Pete Shadbolt, a PsiQuantum co-founder (two are from Australia) and its chief scientific officer, told Semafor that Australia picked his company because it was the most likely to reach a big enough scale to produce impactful results.

In July 2024, PsiQuantum announced they are partnering with the state of Illinois to build the largest US-based quantum computing facility. The Illinois state budget for the fiscal year 2025 includes $500M committed to the development of the Quantum Park, including $200M for the build-out of a Cryogenic Plant to serve the cooling needs for PsiQuantum and other potential users. PsiQuantum has also agreed with the State, Cook County, and the City of Chicago to a comprehensive package of incentives totaling more than $500M over 30 years to enable the company to rapidly move towards the build-out and commissioning of the Quantum Computing Operations Center.