PsiQuantum Bets on Photonic Qubits in Semiconductor Factories

What the business is

Builds fault-tolerant quantum computers on the photonic route: uses standard semiconductor processes to make quantum photonic chips, expands them via fiber interconnects into million-qubit-class machines, and sells them to institutional customers that need computing power.

Starting capital：2025-09-10 disclosed Series E of more than $1 billion (official press release); cumulative commitments from the State of Illinois and local governments of approximately $700 million (2024 $500 million + earlier $200 million, according to Quantum Insider).

How it started

Founded in 2016 in Palo Alto, California, by Jeremy O'Brien, Pete Shadbolt and others. The bet began with a route choice: rather than struggling to improve superconducting-qubit coherence, it bet that photonic qubits could be mass-produced using the semiconductor industry's existing capacity—first small-scale validation, then scaling all the way to a million qubits.

What happened

In 2024-07, it reached agreements with the State of Illinois, Cook County, and Chicago to locate at the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park (IQMP); on 2025-09-10, it announced a Series E of more than $1 billion and disclosed that the Brisbane campus in Australia was being advanced in parallel; on 2025-09-30, it broke ground at the former U.S. Steel South Works site in Chicago—first building the company's largest intermediate-scale test system, to be directly reviewed by a DARPA Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI) expert panel, and then building and deploying the first million-qubit-class fault-tolerant quantum computer in the United States.

What can be applied

Treating quantum computing as a manufacturing problem can bypass competitors' hardest parts, but risk shifts to engineering and funding lasting until results.