Tech company building Brisbane quantum computer reaches US deal – ABC listen

Rachel Mealey: The Silicon Valley tech company promising to build the world’s first fully working quantum computer in Brisbane has just reached a deal to build a second one in the United States. An almost billion dollar investment in PsiQuantum by the Queensland and Federal Governments attracted attention and some controversy when it was announced in April. PsiQuantum’s Australian co-founders say its latest agreement in the US will help it meet the forecast demand for quantum computing power, but some experts are sceptical. Declan Gooch reports.

Declan Gooch: The ink has only just dried on a deal to build the world’s first properly functioning quantum computer in Brisbane. Jeremy O’Brien is the Australian co-founder of PsiQuantum, the Silicon Valley firm that won almost a billion dollars of public funding for the project in April.

Jeremy O’Brien: It’s an entirely new technology that gives unimaginably greater power for particular computational tasks as a result of harnessing the very foundational laws of quantum physics.

Declan Gooch: That investment drew some controversy, partly for its size, and reports that others in the industry felt they hadn’t been offered the chance to compete for the money. But PsiQuantum’s just received another big show of support, this time in its home country. Jeremy O’Brien says the company’s reached an agreement to build a second quantum computer in Chicago.

Jeremy O’Brien: Governments around the world are really acutely aware that this is like the rocket fuel for the future global economy and they want to make sure that they’ve got access to it.

Declan Gooch: The company will become the primary tenant of the $500 million Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park, while the city and county governments are promising the same again in tax incentives for PsiQuantum. Jeremy O’Brien says the US computer should be ready in 2028, a year after the one in Brisbane.

Jeremy O’Brien: Having a second system would just be fantastic. We can double the capacity that we’ll have to tackle all of those really important applications.

Declan Gooch: The promise of quantum computing is the ability to solve problems that would take conventional computers millions or even billions of years. Such machines do exist, but they’re so error prone that they’re effectively useless. And they’re not very high powered. That is, they use relatively few so-called q-bits.

Jeremy O’Brien: What’s really required to unlock all of the profoundly important applications like across healthcare and sustainability, energy production, etc. is a large scale system with error correction and around a million qubits.

Declan Gooch: PsiQuantum believes it can overcome those challenges, but nobody’s been able to yet. Professor Ben Buchler is an expert in quantum science at the Australian National University. He says the toughest part of building a quantum computer that works properly is the need to keep the subatomic particles that these systems rely on totally isolated.

Ben Buchler: The problem that everyone building a quantum computer faces is how do you isolate your processing unit from the rest of the universe so it’s not interfered with by any heat or any other light or any other processes that can stop it from working.

Declan Gooch: But Professor Buchler says the reward would be a computer that can solve just about any conceivable problem, including some that sound simple but have proven impossible.

Ben Buchler: It’s a famous example in quantum computing is a travelling salesperson. You ask, you know, if you’ve got 100 cities, what order should you visit them in order to minimise your fuel costs? It sounds like a really simple problem, but current computers can’t solve that well. A quantum computer could.

Rachel Mealey: Professor Ben Buchler from the Australian National University, Declan Gooch reporting.