PsiQuantum

PsiQuantum was founded in 2016 by four academics from the University of Bristol and Imperial College London — Jeremy O'Brien, Terry Rudolph, Pete Shadbolt and Mark Thompson. The company's founding premise is that a quantum computer only becomes commercially useful once it is error-corrected, and that error correction implies roughly a million physical qubits. A machine of that size cannot be hand-built in a laboratory, so PsiQuantum set out to make its qubits in a semiconductor fab.

Its qubits are single photons, manipulated by optical circuits patterned onto silicon wafers using standard semiconductor processes. Wafers are manufactured by GlobalFoundries at Fab 8 in Malta, New York, under a partnership that has run since 2019. In February 2025 the company announced Omega, a chipset that integrates single-photon sources, superconducting single-photon detectors and barium titanate optical switches, alongside a paper in Nature. The underlying fault-tolerance scheme, fusion-based quantum computation, was invented by co-founder Terry Rudolph.

PsiQuantum's commercial model leans heavily on governments and large industrial partners rather than on cloud access revenue. In April 2024 the Australian Commonwealth and Queensland governments announced a package of equity, grants and loans worth A$940 million (about US$620 million) to support a utility-scale machine in Queensland. The company broke ground on the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park in Chicago in September 2025, with financing for the initial phase from Blue Owl Capital funds, and at Moreton Bay Central in Queensland in June 2026.

It is also one of two companies remaining in Stage C, the final stage of DARPA's Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, and signed a $125 million expanded agreement with the agency in July 2026 — its largest US government agreement to date. In May 2026 it signed a letter of intent with the US Department of Commerce for up to $100 million in proposed CHIPS Act incentives covering barium titanate switches, high-temperature single-photon detectors and advanced packaging.

Leadership changed in 2026. Victor Peng, formerly president of AMD and chief executive of Xilinx, joined as interim chief executive in February 2026 and was confirmed in the role in July; co-founder Jeremy O'Brien became executive chairman. Intel chief executive Lip-Bu Tan joined the board in April 2026 and Atomico founder Niklas Zennström in August 2026. The company employed more than 500 people worldwide as of 2026 and has not delivered a working utility-scale machine; the Queensland site has been targeted to be operational by the end of 2027.