'Scale is the point': PsiQuantum boss on why his US startup deserves Australia's $1b investment
The co-founder and chief executive of PsiQuantum says he believes there is “no alternative” to leveraging the semiconductor industry as a means to build the world’s first commercially useful quantum computer.
PsiQuantum co-founder and chief executive Jeremy O’Brien has addressed concerns over whether the $1 billion investment in his Silicon Valley startup amounted to governments picking winners, saying the world had entered into “an age of industrial policy” led by big-spending initiatives from major powers like the United States, European Union and China.
In an interview with Capital Brief, O’Brien, who was born in Sydney and raised in Perth, also said he had exhausted all available technological possibilities over the past two decades before arriving at the conclusion that there was “no alternative” to the photonic approach to quantum computing adopted by his company.
PsiQuantum’s approach uses a photonics-based architecture of embedding light particles in conventional silicon chips, which requires the use of around a million qubits for one quantum computer. O’Brien says other competitors require building new industries from scratch – when his approach leverages the trillions of dollars and more than 50 years already spent on semiconductor chips.
“If you accept that you need a million qubits as we did a decade or two ago, then you're left with no alternative but semiconductor chip manufacturing,” O’Brien said. “So from the 1990s, my conviction was that there ain’t any other way to do it.”
