PsiQuantum today announced a $10.8M contract with the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) in Rome, N.Y., continuing a partnership that began in 2022. This phase will give AFRL a design space for comparative quantum circuits on PsiQuantum’s circuit tapeout, part of its ongoing Omega quantum chipset manufacturing with GlobalFoundries. As AFRL’s hardware design partner, PsiQuantum will supply its high-performance Barium Titanate (BTO) Electro-Optic phase shifters and integrate BTO into AFRL-designed optical circuits. PsiQuantum’s 300mm BTO material is believed to be the world’s highest-performing electro-switch material. The company will also provide essential quantum circuit components. Once designed, constructed, and screened for performance, the company will deliver these completed chips to AFRL, who will then validate their capabilities to address other Air Force use cases.

Sparrow Quantum, a leading European supplier of photonic quantum chips, has secured €21.5 million in Series A funding to accelerate the development and commercialization of its world-leading quantum chip technology. The investment round was led by PensionDanmark, with strong backing from EIFO and Novo Holdings and additional investments from existing investors 2xN, LIFTT, and the European Innovation Council. This investment will enable Sparrow Quantum to meet the growing demand for photonic quantum hardware by accelerating R&D, expanding chip production, and bringing next-generation quantum chips to market.

MIT researchers developed a photon-shuttling “interconnect” that can facilitate remote entanglement, a key step toward a practical quantum computer.

PsiQuantum today announces Omega, a quantum photonic chipset purpose-built for utility-scale quantum computing. Featured in a newly published paper in Nature, the chipset contains all the advanced components required to build million-qubit-scale quantum computers and deliver on the profoundly world-changing promise of this technology. Every photonic component is demonstrated with beyond-state-of-the-art performance. The paper shows high-fidelity qubit operations, and a simple, long-range chip-to-chip qubit interconnect – a key enabler to scale that has remained challenging for other technologies. The chips are made in a high-volume semiconductor fab, representing a new level of technical maturity and scale in a field that is often thought of as being confined to research labs. PsiQuantum will break ground this year on two datacenter-sized Quantum Compute Centers in Brisbane, Australia and Chicago, Illinois.

Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced Ocelot, a new quantum computing chip that can reduce the costs of implementing quantum error correction by up to 90%, compared to current approaches. Developed by the team at the AWS Center for Quantum Computing at the California Institute of Technology, Ocelot represents a breakthrough in the pursuit to build fault-tolerant quantum computers capable of solving problems of commercial and scientific importance that are beyond the reach of today’s conventional computers.

Microsoft today introduced Majorana 1, the world’s first quantum chip powered by a new Topological Core architecture that it expects will realize quantum computers capable of solving meaningful, industrial-scale problems in years, not decades.

In a significant milestone for scalable quantum computing, Quantum Motion, a UK-based quantum computing scale-up founded by academics from University College London and Oxford University, has demonstrated rapid, large-scale characterisation of quantum devices fabricated using commercial semiconductor processes. Quantum Motion has designed a silicon chip featuring an integrated array of 1024 quantum dots on an area of less than 0.1mm² and validated them in less than 5 minutes—at least 100 times faster than the current state of the art. The chips were manufactured by GlobalFoundries, a leading semiconductor manufacturer, with whom Quantum Motion has announced a partnership to develop quantum processors based on a scalable silicon platform.

Within the framework of the European Chips Strategy, the so-called European Chips Act, the European Commission has announced the creation of PIXEurope, a new European pilot line for photonic chips that aims to offer cutting-edge technological platforms, transforming and transferring innovative and disruptive integrated photonics processes and technologies to accelerate their industrial adoption. The objective is the creation of European-owned/made technology in a sector of capital importance for technological sovereignty, and therefore for the creation and maintenance of the corresponding jobs in the Union.

The Netherlands will have a European pilot plant for photonic chips. This future generation of chips will process information with light instead of electrons. A total of 380 million euros in public investment has been made available for this project by Europe and eleven participating countries, which participate in the Chips Joint Undertaking for this project. Twente will receive a significant share, a mega-boost for chip technology in Twente.

EU funding for this call of €65 million is expected to be matched by the participating states of the Chips JU. This is part of the €200 million EU investment in quantum chips envisaged under the Chips JU over the next three years.