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SkyWater and Qolab Team Up to Build Quantum Chips in the Midwest

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September 8, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

SkyWater Technology is investing in dedicated quantum tool upgrades as part of a broader modernization, signaling a financial commitment to manufacturing within its existing facilities. The company and Qolab announced a multi-year collaboration designed to transition superconducting technology from custom development to repeatable wafer manufacturing, establishing what the companies claim is an open-access and capital-efficient model.

“Quantum technologies are moving beyond the laboratory and require commercial manufacturing models adapted for their unique needs,” said Thomas Sonderman, President and CEO of SkyWater Technology. This partnership links SkyWater’s Minnesota fabrication capabilities with Qolab’s Wisconsin design and testing expertise, creating a coordinated Midwest pathway for superconducting quantum devices.

SkyWater’s SC250 Platform Enables Qolab’s Quantum System-in-Package

SkyWater Technology’s newly launched SC250 platform is central to Qolab’s advancement of its Quantum System-in-Package (QSiP) architecture, a design intended to address challenges in scaling quantum systems. The QSiP integrates cryogenic wiring, low-pass filters, and amplifiers into a single compact package, addressing cost, complexity, and physical size limitations that currently hinder wider adoption. This integration is a key element in Qolab’s strategy to improve the economics of quantum computing hardware.

The collaboration between the two companies establishes a commercial framework, moving beyond custom development toward repeatable wafer manufacturing; it’s a direct alteration of existing infrastructure to support quantum-specific manufacturing processes. “SkyWater brings an established track record of supporting quantum programs and gives us access to the specialized capabilities needed to advance our Quantum System-in-Package,” said Dr. John Martinis, Chief Technology Officer of Qolab.

The agreement provides Qolab with increased visibility into production scaling and creates a commercial model designed to encourage broader adoption of SkyWater’s superconducting technologies. Martinis explained that QSiP is designed to materially improve quantum system economics by integrating costly, complex cryogenic control components into a compact package.

Combining SkyWater’s flexible development support with a repeatable wafer services model, Qolab anticipates gaining the manufacturing and cost visibility necessary to rapidly iterate toward commercial deployment. This approach combines specialized process development with production-oriented wafer services in a mature foundry environment, accelerating the path to differentiated quantum technologies and benefiting the entire industry.

Quantum technologies are moving beyond the laboratory and require commercial manufacturing models adapted for their unique needs.

Thomas Sonderman, President and CEO of SkyWater Technology
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Ivy Delaney

Ivy Delaney has been working with neural networks and machine learning since the mid-nineties, back when a couple of hidden layers and a long afternoon of training counted as ambitious. She has watched the field go from academic curiosity to the thing quietly running underneath everything, and she brings that long view to quantum computing. For Quantum Zeitgeist she covers the ground where the two fields meet. That means quantum machine learning and the variational algorithms it leans on, and it also means the less glamorous but more interesting story of classical machine learning already doing real work inside quantum machines, decoding error-correcting codes, calibrating noisy hardware and learning the error models that simulators depend on. She writes about the hardware those algorithms have to run on too, and about the post-quantum cryptography scramble that the same hardware has set off. Her stories typically start with the paper, whether that is peer-reviewed work, conference proceedings or an arXiv preprint, with the source linked so you can hold a claim up against the research it came from. She is unimpressed by benchmarks that will not say what they beat, and by demonstrations that only work in the press release.

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