By Stephen Nellis <\/p>\n
SAN FRANCISCO, July 22 (Reuters) – PsiQuantum has signed a $125 million agreement with the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects \u200cAgency, the quantum computing startup’s largest U.S. government award to \u200cdate. <\/p>\n
The deal falls under DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, which aims to determine whether it \u200bis possible to build an industrially useful quantum computer by 2033. The award will fund testing of PsiQuantum’s hardware and software and follows a $31.8 million DARPA agreement in September 2025. <\/p>\n
In an interview, PsiQuantum Chief Executive Victor \u200cPeng said the DARPA \u2060vetting will help the industry work out “what’s real and what’s not.” He said PsiQuantum’s first commercial-scale machine should \u2060be running around 2030. <\/p>\n
“We can do simulations and solve problems that traditional computing, even for the next few centuries, won’t solve,” Peng said. <\/p>\n
Founded in 2016, \u200bPsiQuantum \u200buses photonics \u2014 the light-based technology behind \u200bfiber-optic cables of the internet \u2014 \u200cwith chips manufactured at GlobalFoundries in New York. It raised $1 billion at a $7 billion valuation last September, in a round led by BlackRock, Temasek and Baillie Gifford, with Nvidia’s venture arm participating. <\/p>\n
The deal deepens PsiQuantum’s work with the U.S. government. In May, the Commerce Department said \u200cit would take minority equity stakes in \u200bnine quantum firms in exchange for $2 billion \u200bunder the CHIPS Act, with \u200bIBM due $1 billion, GlobalFoundries $375 million and PsiQuantum $100 million. \u200cThose agreements are not final. <\/p>\n
Peng, a \u200bformer Advanced Micro \u200bDevices president, was named permanent CEO this month after joining as interim chief in February. Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan joined PsiQuantum’s board in \u200bApril, and it \u200crecently recruited executives who previously worked at memory chipmaker Sandisk \u200band chip design software firm Synopsys. <\/p>\n
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in \u200bSan Francisco; Editing by Sam Holmes) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Stephen Nellis SAN FRANCISCO, July 22 (Reuters) – PsiQuantum has signed a $125 million agreement with the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":532754,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[114,59791,251379,85,46,73921,1423],"class_list":["post-553930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-darpa","tag-defense-advanced-research-projects-agency","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-psiquantum","tag-quantum-computing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=553930"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553930\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/532754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=553930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=553930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=553930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}