Who said there was a crisis in funding? The Californian based start-up PsiQuantum has just garnered a massive amount of funding for its quest to build the worlds most powerful Quantum Computer. This brings the total funding to $215m.
Based around photonics, PsiQuantum’s quest is to build a one million qubit Quantum Computer. Other companies such as Google have achieved high tens of qubits (53 for example). Rather like the race for increasing the number of transistors for traditional processors, the more is usually better, and to be truly useful scientists think that millions will provide the kinds of benefits that have been touted for decades and solve real-world problems.
At PsiQuantum our singular focus is on building the world’s first useful general purpose quantum computer. That end goal set us on a different path, with a different underlying technology — silicon photonic qubits produced in a conventional semiconductor fab.
PsiQuantum Mission Statement
The technological stance is that to get just a few hundred fully operational qubits, millions of noisy and error prone qubits will be need to created and through error correction useful calculations can still be performed. Already researchers have apparently shown Quantum Supremacy at just 53 qubits (Google).
Backers are some of the more well known funds such as Blackrock, Founders Fund and Atomico and Microsoft. Likely the investment puts them in the cross hairs of IBM, Honeywell, D-Wave and Google who have been steadily gaining experience and greater qubit counts with their ambitions to build ever more powerful and useful Quantum Computers. If the company can truly produce large numbers of qubits as easily as transistors then the technology could be truly revolutionary. However there is some controversy over whether the technology is all that t is cracked up to be due to the lack of peer reviewed papers.
