Company
ActivePsiQuantum
Palo Alto · Since 2016
Still private. It is building toward a photonic quantum computer and does not yet run one as a commercial service.
A later timeline chapter projects a role for this organization. That chapter is a projection. This page is about the institution as it exists, or as it existed.
PsiQuantum was founded in 2016 by Jeremy O'Brien and colleagues to build a quantum computer out of photons, using the fabrication methods of ordinary semiconductor plants rather than a one-off physics experiment.
The company is still private. It does not offer a commercial machine a customer can log into. It employs people to design one, and it has persuaded governments and investors to fund the attempt at a scale most hardware startups never reach. That is a real payroll attached to an unfinished object.
Designing a factory for a computer
The distinctive jobs are photonic engineers and the people who talk to a semiconductor foundry about a chip that foundry has never run. If the approach works, the later jobs look like a plant. If it does not, they remain a research staff. The 2035 chapter's category of application translators, the firms that turn a chemistry problem into something a quantum machine can run, does not exist here yet as a customer base. PsiQuantum is still on the machine.
Do not date the success
The company is active now. A page that declared it the supplier of 2035 would be fan fiction. The timeline refuses that, and so does this entry. What the museum can say is that a group of people are already employed, in Palo Alto and with partners abroad, to try.
The work it organized
- Photonics engineer
- Chip designer
- Foundry partner
- Quantum theorist
On the timeline
Related
- IonQActive
- QuantinuumActive