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.

A team of researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and its partners have made significant advancements in random quantum circuit sampling with Zuchongzhi-3, a superconducting quantum computing prototype featuring 105 qubits and 182 couplers. Operating at a speed 10¹⁵ times faster than the most powerful supercomputer currently available and one million times faster than Google's latest published results, the achievement marks a major milestone in quantum computing and follows the success of its predecessor, Zuchongzhi-2.

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.

In a milestone that brings quantum computing tangibly closer to large-scale practical use, scientists at Oxford University Physics have demonstrated the first instance of distributed quantum computing. Using a photonic network interface, they successfully linked two separate quantum processors to form a single, fully connected quantum computer, paving the way to tackling computational challenges previously out of reach. The results have been published today in Nature.

The “Photonic Technologies” call is now open for applications. NWO and the PhotonDelta Foundation want to further stimulate early-stage research on photonic technologies in this way. This will ultimately allow groundbreaking photonic materials, photonic chips, devices and systems to be delivered. A total of 7 million euro is financed by PhotonDelta.

Thales Alenia Space, the joint venture between Thales (67%) and Leonardo (33%), and Hispasat, Redeia’s satellite services operator, have announced the start of the development, manufacturing, verification, and validation phase of the QKD-GEO prototype, Spain’s quantum key distribution system from geostationary orbit. With a budget of 103.5 million euros, the QKD-GEO mission is a project initiated by the Spanish Secretary of State for Telecommunications and Digital Infrastructures and funded by European funds from the Recovery, Transformation, and Resilience Plan (PERTE Aeroespacial), for which contracting is managed by CDTI.

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory joined forces with EPB of Chattanooga and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga to demonstrate the first transmission of an entangled quantum signal using multiple wavelength channels and automatic polarization stabilization over a commercial network with no downtime.

Quobly, a cutting-edge quantum computing startup, today announced a transformative collaboration with STMicroelectronics, a global semiconductor leader serving customers across the spectrum of electronics applications, to produce quantum processor units (QPUs) at scale. By leveraging STMicroelectronics’ advanced FD-SOI semiconductor process technologies, this collaboration is set to make large-scale quantum computing feasible and cost-effective, positioning both companies at the forefront of next-generation computing technologies.

This week, the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs announced that the National Growth Fund plan PhotonDelta will contribute €53.8 million to the PIXEurope pilot line that will be built in the Netherlands.

A research team from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), led by Prof. PAN Jianwei, ZHANG Qiang, and CHEN Kai, in collaboration with CHEN Jingling from Nankai University, has achieved the loophole-free test of Hardy's paradox for the first time.