PsiQuantum’s $1B Series E, Nvidia, & the Race to 1 Million Qubits

32:47Instead, we said, no, you need to go straight to a million qubits and I need a billion dollars to do it and so on. I'm also pretty contrarian on this AI stuff. So I think probably there's a good fraction of this audience who would love to hear me say, thanks to AI, now we can have the quantum computer much sooner. You're going to clip that. I know you are. I will. I definitely will. I'll take it out of context too. So like what is Cyclontum, right? Cyclontum is a Silicon Valley startup company, but secretly we're a 1980s Silicon Valley chip company and a big chunk of our DNA and our center of mass is a semiconductor chip company.

33:27Like where we spend most of the money is making silicon wafers in a fab in global foundries in upstate new york and the i have learned over the last decade like the semiconductor chip industry is incredibly conservative it's because if you tape out if you send designs to the fab that are wrong you don't find out for six months and it completely ruins your life and so the extent to which we actually use new stuff is incredibly uh low we basically don't use AI at all inside the company to design chips. And I think if you go and look at people who are building millions of chips in industry, there's a very small amount of AI, if any, that's being involved in the actual design of those chips today.

34:19It's a pretty boring, like old school, gray and kind of ancient practice to design and make these chips really work as intended. So I like that. I think it's cool. Like we're kind of building these chips in a very, very traditional old school way. And that is honestly how the semiconductor industry operates, apart from a few little frothy news stories that you see from time to time. So no, I don't think that AI is going to dramatically reduce our timelines. Currently, our timelines are mostly determined, as far as I can tell, by infrastructure, right? We're breaking ground on these sites in Australia and Chicago.

35:02These are roughly 100 megawatt, multi-hundred thousand square foot sites. We've got to put about 100 tons of hardware onto the ground to make helium on those sites. That's a multi-year exercise to stand up that helium liquefier for those machines. And so none of that is accelerated by AI. That's accelerated by digging faster, laying concrete faster, cutting metal faster. And there's a limit to how far you can go with that. So I think actually it's probably the other way around. It's that we have technologies as a byproduct of what we've done at SciQuantum that I'm pretty optimistic can be helpful in building next generation AI supercomputers in mitigating some of the frightening prospects that are otherwise faced with power and so on.

35:56And then ultimately, I want the quantum computer to produce data that is fed into an AI supercomputer. But yeah, that's an unpopular answer. We barely use AI inside the company to do this chip design, at least. Contrary intake. Yeah. We love that. We do use it for the decoder. So there are limited pieces where it's really, really impactful. So, for instance, the system that runs the quantum error correcting code, it's a good example, actually, of the sort of the surreptitious nature of these technologies where they're fantasy until they're not. I like to point at self-driving cars as well in this respect.

36:42Even like five years ago, VCs would laugh when I said self-driving, like they would say self-driving fantasy, never going to happen. you know, they'll get some demo working. But the idea of a fleet of Waymo is driving across San Francisco with literally nobody behind the wheel is just, you know, you're very naive. You have no experience. I've seen this before. It's never going to happen. And suddenly it's real. Now they only want to take a Waymo. Now those same people say, I never, never want to see somebody in the driver's seat ever again. Like with quantum computing seven years ago, that decoder piece, which runs the error correcting code, people would tell ghost stories where they would say the decoder is going to kill you.

37:24The decoder needs this multi-gigawatt supercomputer to actually run that conventional logic that's just fixing errors in the machine. And over the last five or six years, those estimates have come down precipitously. And that's partly because of new approaches based on neural decoders that have been really, really successful. So yeah, there are pieces of the machine where AI is definitely going to be critically important for the success of the thing. But I like the component where most of our chip development would be completely recognizable to somebody from the 1980s. We're going to get into chip development a little bit further.

38:12But while I still have you at the start, you're going to get another big question. Okay, so you've raised billions of dollars, pretty much billions at this point, but you don't yet have a product in the market. Why should the public believe in PsyQuantum's vision? Let me not answer the question and then I'll answer the question if that's okay. So the non-answer is that, again, many of the most consequential companies of our time are not used by the public. So what happens inside TSMC? What happens in an ASML EUV machine? You know, programming a 100 ,000 GPU NVIDIA cluster, operating a Raptor engine from SpaceX, or designing a payload that's going to go on a launch.

39:04These are incredibly esoteric activities. It's really striking to me that like these enormous companies that everyone nods their heads and agrees are legendary. The people who use those companies, like the end user for those technologies or like the direct interaction, at least with that technology, is an incredibly small number of scientists, basically. Like how many people on the planet can operate an ASML EUV machine or design a payload for SpaceX or whatever? It's really an esoteric activity that is running these, that's fueling these companies. Quantum computing is the same, right? Like most people will never program a quantum computer.

39:45Most people will never directly interact with a quantum computer. And that is fine. And that is how our economy seems to be operating at the moment. That's the first thing to say, which is this is not a mass adoption technology. But then, yeah, the spirit of the question is very understandable, which is you've raised all this money. How do we know that you're not full of crap, basically? And so there's a whole variety of pieces of machinery that get deployed there. Firstly, of course, people do diligence on us. We know a huge fraction of the academic community who have come and examined the status of our technology, asked us a lot of questions, come to our labs, seen our data.

40:32In the case of the Australian government, they looked at two dozen companies in that process. The chief scientist of Australia at the end of that. Well, it's funny. There was actually a media, there was media coverage of that in which there was a, I think, freedom of information or similar kind of request. They dug up a bunch of emails in that Australian process. And one of the first emails from the chief scientist says that she's very skeptical of our approach. So this was a news story in Australia, chief scientist, highly skeptical of psych quantum approach at the outset, to which I'm like, what do you want?

41:11You want her to be like highly credulous on day one and say, I love this. No, you want her to be highly skeptical at the outset. And then at the end of that, I don't know, 18 month process, she concludes that we're a country mile ahead of anyone else. and obviously there's risk and you know you can never make these things black and white but that was a very very in-depth process they came to the lab they came and measured our devices they came and looked over our shoulder and watched us reproduce these uh these measurements that's a level of scrutiny that no academic journal has ever done in my experience like they never physically come to the lab and look over your shoulder.

41:52And then, you know, probably the biggest exercise that has been done to look at our technology from a third party perspective has been DARPA. If I were like a member of the public paying taxes, which I am, I would be pretty frustrated by some of the sort of approach that's often taken to quantum computing, where people say It's a strategic priority. It's the future. And then governments just kind of hand money to companies. They say, we love quantum computing. Quantum computing is awesome. Here's some taxpayer money. And I'd be sitting there thinking, well, they haven't proven anything. They don't have a product.

42:34They've been talking about this quantum computing crap for years. I don't like the sound of this very much. And DARPA did something really nice, which is they did the opposite. it. They said DARPA is going to start from the assumption that quantum computing doesn't work. Nobody's got any idea how to build one. They're full of crap on their timelines. And even if they could build it, it wouldn't actually be useful. It wouldn't do anything worthwhile. That was DARPA's starting assumption. And then they took 50 scientists and engineers and told them, Essentially, I'm paraphrasing, but I don't think it's that terribly far from reality that they told those people, your job is to kill quantum computing companies.

43:20Like your job is to go and talk to all of these guys and your success will be measured on how many of those you can shut down. I mean, I'm paraphrasing, but it's not that far from what they did, which is awesome, right? Because like, so now DARPA have, as I said, come and measured our devices. They've spent enormous amount of time with our team over the course of many years. And if you go and talk to DARPA people today, they will not say, PsyQuantum has a 100 % chance of success. There is no doubt in my mind. We can prove that they're going to be successful, et cetera. But what they can say is, we've had 50 people trying to kill this thing for years.

44:00We've been in their buildings. We've talked to their people. We've taken a sort of red team position on their approach. And we still have not killed them. And they have just graduated to the final phase of our program. They're one of two companies to have reached that point. And that, to me, is like a really serious way of dealing with a frontier technology like this, right? Like, I'm obviously biased as to the prospects of success and so on and so on. And it's really welcome to have a serious, qualified bunch of people come and do that kind of red team exercise on what we're doing. And I'm very proud of our team who've made it through to the end of that.

44:41But yeah, like we're obviously a deep tech company. We're obviously a zero to one kind of technology. There are a lot of examples of companies who've raised a hell of a lot more money than us in a similar kind of situation, not in quantum computing, but in kind of similar technologies. And I just think it's exciting that Silicon Valley and the world is still doing this kind of thing, like, and actually seems to be increasingly understanding that you've got to do this kind of stuff, that you've got to push the frontier. I think it's good. One thing that's just so fascinating with all of this is that there are so many quantum companies.

45:25And there's so many public quantum companies too. Like who would have thought you could just like take your pick out of like five, six stocks, but they all kind of like took the window, did a SPAC thing and they're still around. In terms of that, how do you justify these public valuations? How do you justify private or public valuations for frontier tech? Yeah. So, I mean, I mean, I'm not going to justify the valuations of competitors. I'm a scientist. But yeah, there's tons of companies. If I were an observer of this field, I'd be really frustrated just by the endless competitive positioning that goes on.

46:08Every founder like me will come and talk to you and tell you why their technology is the best. And everybody else's technology sucks and it's awful. and like journalists and investors and government people are endlessly frustrated with this kind of stuff and I would be frustrated too. I think it's probably like I wasn't there for it, but I imagine this is how memory technologies went in the sort of 90s in Silicon Valley. So there were people running around with different physical implementations of memory for conventional computing. and uh um and all arguing in in favor of one particular approach and then you know from my from my point of view at least it tends to be that that is much more of a filter than a race if you look at what we do with transistors if we look at what we do with sram if you look at all sorts of these kind of hard physical uh technology um like landscapes they tend to concentrate into one or two leading approaches.

47:16But yeah, on valuations, I mean, again, I think to be sympathetic to these high valuations, if you can do it, you earn your place in that list, right? Like TSMC, ASML, SpaceX, NVIDIA, like you earn your place in that list and they're not there yet. Nobody is. Nobody has a useful quantum computer. um but all of these teams are seriously believing that they can get to that kind of stage I think probably the the way I would put it is just that you've got to judge the risk on that right like you know ultimately are they on a trajectory that can end with world domination and multi-hundred billion dollar valuations and so on.

48:04Yeah, I think that there is a serious prospect that these companies do that. But there is a much greater chance that they go to zero is basically my simple way of putting it. If people want to bet on that, that's cool. I would say don't listen to anybody who produces a little table of the pros and cons of their own technology where the check marks are all in their own column and then you put crosses in everybody else's column. These tables somehow are very persuasive to people, and I think they're really stupid. I think better questions are, again, with the understanding that you need a giant system to solve commercially useful problems.

48:46If I were looking at quantum computing companies, I would be asking, in addition to peer-reviewed academic literature on the qubit, the gate, the fidelity, all of that kind of stuff, like the basic properties of the technology. There's a bunch of questions that kind of go missing, which is like, who is your fab? Who is your contract manufacturer? Where are you getting power? Where are you getting water? Where is the plot of land where you're going to build this system? Has a government spent a few years diligencing you? Did they give you serious capital at the end of that process? You know, who's your building contractor?

49:26These are necessary but not sufficient questions, but they tend to get completely lost in this honestly kind of silly arguing over, you know, ions versus superconducting qubits versus photons versus whatever. That stuff is really important, but it's a small piece of the puzzle of building a data center size machine. One of the things I've been listening to public market analysts on this is the business fundamentals. Yeah. And, you know, you can look at PE ratios. You can look at all these different things, blah, blah, blah. Some of them are looking at their cash positions. I'm like, hmm, like really?

50:06I don't know if like cash positions is really like the great measure here. But a critical question below all of that is the revenue drivers. Yeah. And so how are you going to be making revenue? How are all these other companies making revenue along the way? Yeah, I mean, I think it's unfortunate that people like me, who are scientists, who end up founding these companies and having leadership positions in these companies, we get coached that there is a certain way to do a venture-backed company. And the coaching is very often, you've got to get some kind of revenue by any means necessary really early and that's certainly true if you're a sas company right like if i'm building a sas company i better go and produce some early revenues but uh what happens with quantum computing is that it motivates people to go and twist themselves into knots trying to produce revenues with a machine that is categorically not useful and that is kind of what has been going on in quantum computing, right?

51:16Like that two qubit chip that I had in Bristol 10 years ago, it had a web API, people could sign in, they could run code. I could have started charging people for that, right? Like a few thousand bucks a shot or something, and people would have paid for it. And it would create the impression that I'm on some incremental trajectory of revenue where that machine can be simulated by a pocket calculator on a laptop. It's a completely useless machine. And so the appropriate thing with quantum computing is to face up to the unpleasant reality, which is that this is a zero to one technology. Like self-driving, right?

51:55Like Waymo is, I think, a pretty good example here. Waymo is a useless company until they cross that threshold, until they got that fleet. And it's really working. And then you look at them and say, my God, these guys are going to dominate every major city in the world. Right. And unless Tesla comes for them. But, you know, they're now like they transition from enormous upfront capital, like way more than anything we're planning for. They transition from that to something really compelling and exciting pretty, pretty fast. So it's important with quantum computing to understand, like you are on the far end of the spectrum in that respect.

52:38Get comfortable with it. Don't pretend that you're a SaaS company or some incremental type of technology. You have to own the reality of what you're doing. And then how are we going to make money? So we are basically hell bent on getting to that very large system as fast as humanly possible. And that is the promise that we've made to investors, to governments, etc. That capital, that time is only going to be spent to get to a really useful machine as fast as humanly possible. Once that machine comes online, we're not going to sell it. Selling a, you know, 100 ,000 square foot system is dangerous and stupid is probably how I'd put it.

53:25Selling time on it is like really natural, right? Like you want to sign in, run some code on the machine, we can charge people to do that. And again, you should sort of visualize this thing as a fountain of knowledge, as a machine, an oracle that can answer questions about chemistry, material science, etc. that no other system on the planet can answer. We expect that people will pay serious money when, you know, currently they might spend a billion dollars over a decade to bring a new drug to market. They might be doing incredibly intensive trial and error development of new electrolytes for lithium ion batteries.

54:02You know, there's enormous waste and time and overhead currently involved in these kind of processes. And so I think that's driving the appetite with our commercial customers that we have today to prepare for the existence of that machine. And so you can build a nice Excel spreadsheet, right, where you model selling time on that system in a kind of cloud computing framing like Azure or AWS or whatever. And that's, you can pretty quickly convince yourself that that will be a very lucrative machine when we turn that system on. However, I look at that and I say, I've just spent my entire adult life trying to bring about an oracle that gives us a glimpse into virgin territory that we will otherwise never access.

54:54And I think, why are we selling that in its raw form? Why are we just not capitalizing on that ourselves? And so I get a little bit into deranged founder territory here, but I think there is, you know, you look at that thing and you say, why would we not hire drug discovery people, hire material scientists, hire chemists and start to actually exploit the knowledge and information that's coming out of that machine, exploit that directly, build something that is more vertically integrated. we're not about to build Pfizer on top of a quantum computing company overnight but we can definitely take steps in that direction and that I think is how you build a company the likes of which the world has never seen before a legendary generationally significant company is through that kind of little bit more vertical integration what would be the main value drivers of potential customers and who are your customers now I think it's helpful just to think about what is currently done with conventional computing and especially what's currently done with ai when i look at language models as an outsider i see those language models sort of consuming territory really quick right like they're getting stronger and stronger and they're starting to take over things that people have been doing either with human beings or with regular computing at a very fast rate But we also know there's a limit to that, like that kind of expansion of territory will stop at a boundary where the stuff on the other side of that boundary is for us, from my point of view.

56:38Right. Like we're going to go after the stuff that people don't do with language models, etc. And as far as we're concerned, the low hanging fruit is really materials and chemistry. that's where our so we have about 50 person applications team who engage with car companies materials companies energy companies etc to prepare them for the existence of that big machine and a lot of that work is on small molecule drug discovery catalysts basically small hard molecular or like reaction chemistry material science problems systems. When you talk about quantum computing, people sort of tend to list the same categories of application and that's one of them.

57:23They often talk about optimization problems. They often talk about quantum machine learning. And then the one that always comes up like the elephant in the room is code breaking. And I think we'll probably touch on code breaking. But our review on optimization is that it's really difficult to do, to do, like, tremendously impactful optimization with a quantum computer. Conventional computers are already surprisingly good at optimization. and the quantum algorithms that we know of for optimization problems have some bugs basically like they're pretty painful to make them useful so the jury's out is sort of how i put it on optimization we're a little pessimistic on that piece quantum machine learning is really nice to think about it sounds awesome in like a press release uh it's really early is how i put it like the development of the theory is not yet at a stage where you can confidently say quantum computing is going to be awesome for accelerating machine learning models or something like that you cannot say that at this point there are sort of reasonable reasons to be excited and there's some glimmers of of excitement that needs a lot more work we do a lot of work on partial differential equations which is jargon obviously but underlies a huge fraction of things that people do in financial industry, fluid dynamics in aerospace, all sorts of stuff is sitting on PDEs.

58:49And we have some pretty exciting work on that piece. And then I think we'll come to code breaking. But yeah, the sort of macro picture that I think is helpful is that language models are going to eat language and coding and stuff like that. And then there's this whole territory of like the physical world, basically, that we're going to go after and that we think will remain mostly off limits. One thing that you've mentioned a couple of times is the construction and the value where you think there's actual like there's actual weight behind these companies. Yeah. For PsyQuantum in particular, you have the Chicago site, you have Australia.

59:28Yeah. You are starting to break ground and we're going to do a tour on this on your I don't know how to say it. South Bay. We'll just go with, okay, we'll just go with South Bay because I keep on messing up the name of that. Melipidus. Melipidus, yeah. Yeah. You've set up shop in America. Actually, before that, talk about those sites because I know each one of them is like completely different in like, I don't want to give it away. Okay. You want just a map of the world? No, no, no. Because like, what I'm trying to get at is like you um you built the Australian one yeah on an airport the Chicago one is an old steel mill like could you just break down how each of these sites you strategically found like the best possible place to build yeah um so uh I want to make a drawing but I can't.

1:00:25Here's some paper. Yeah I'll save you that. Yeah so we I'm British everyone thinks I'm Australian. That's because. Wait you're not. No I'm British. You're British? Yeah. Okay. That's what my girlfriend does when I when we talk about England. She goes. Cold place warm place. Yeah we started out in the UK but my two co-founders are Australian and they were working in Australia, in Brisbane prior to that. A lot of the foundational work on optical quantum computing specifically was done in Australia like 20, 25 years ago. And they're just a few nations and like specific parts of the world that were early in investing in quantum computing.

1:01:08So UK, Australia, US obviously, Chicago specifically has a really, really strong concentration of quantum computing stuff specifically. and that's partly because of their history, you know, national labs, first sustained nuclear reaction, et cetera, et cetera, great universities. But yeah, we did the basic research in the UK for decades at the University of Bristol and Imperial College. We now have a lab in the north of England, which is a decommissioned synchrotron accelerator. It's a UK government lab. And that happens to have a big helium liquefier that we can use to run test systems. We're not building a quantum computer in the UK at the moment, but we do have that R &D site that's been incredibly productive for us.

1:02:00We're very grateful to the UK government for some funding there. Headquarters is currently in California, so we're based in Palo Alto. Up until about nine months ago, our main lab for the whole company was 10 ,000 square feet of former conference rooms, basically. So nine months ago, we had raised$750 million. We were a few hundred people. And we were like crammed into this 10 ,000 square foot space where we've like ripped out the whiteboards and the coffee machines and put in like 300 millimeter wafer tester. It's like classic Silicon Valley. You walk through the front door and expect that it's like a crappy lawyer's office.

1:02:43And then it's like full of silicon wafers and liquid helium and cryostats and whatever. We still have that space, but it's way too small for us. And so now we've moved to the South Bay. We've got 140 ,000 square foot of space in this new building. We've got 40 ,000 square feet of former Class 10 cleanroom space. That building used to have 10 megawatts of power to it. Currently, we're down to a megawatt, but we'll go back up to 10 megawatts. And my shorthand on what that building is doing is that it's the Foxconn of quantum computing. So our whole approach is to leverage existing fabs and contract manufacturers and so on.

1:03:24But that building is doing the exceptions to that rule. So where we have to do our own materials production or our own assembly, that kind of assembly line and clean room space is here in the South Bay. We use Global Foundries in upstate New York. So we have 10 people and 10 shipping container sized semiconductor manufacturing tools. We've spent over$100 million over the last eight years or so to establish that manufacturing process at GF. That's an enormous tier one semiconductor foundry. I think 450 ,000 square foot single span room full of tools, like many, many, many billions of dollars of semiconductor manufacturing.

1:04:08that's where our silicon comes from and then we use the standard linear accelerator on sandhill road so a lot of vcs endlessly drive up and down sandhill roads without realizing this was really cool yeah so right opposite light speed yeah uh is the standard linear accelerator i think you had not seen it i had no idea and then you showed me on on google maps yeah so people live in silicon valley their whole life have no idea there's an alien structure there by the way they never see a wafer. Every time I show people a wafer, they're like, why is it round? And I'm like, you're Silicon Valley. What are you doing?

1:04:44You haven't seen a Silicon wafer. You've never touched a Silicon wafer. So that's that. And then people drive around in Silicon Valley and they don't know that there's a two mile long linear accelerator carving through some of the most expensive real estate in the United States that's visible from space, immediately visible on google maps and cuts under 280 so when you drive down 280 and there'll be a lot of people listening who drive down 280 every day and who have never looked right at just the right moment to see a very surreal looking object that stretches off into the distance that's the standard linear accelerator used to be the longest building in the world uh just sort of heading down towards Woodside.

1:05:28There's a 36 ,000 watt liquid helium cryo plant on that site. So 30 ,000 square foot industrial facility, and that's making helium at deep space temperature. So at minus 270 degrees just over the street from light speed. Most people don't even have any. So when we were raising money, when we were raising series a myself and my co-founder were uh would ride our bikes up and down um sandhill trying to find a series a term sheet and it didn't cross our minds that there's kilowatts of liquid helium over the street but we now have a have hardware on on the concrete there so we have some of our cabinet well one of our uh cabinets right now installed at slack and uh up and running and how do you get that like how do you secure that we are very grateful for our partnership with the staff of linear accelerator and department of energy and they've been really gracious they had some spare helium um so that's a huge like loud industrial facility that's making very large volumes of helium to run the the linac we're tapping off just a little tiny piece of that uh to evaluate our system and that but it's pretty exciting because that is the same scale of cryo plant that we will now put into australia and chicago and the cabinet that we use is pretty close to the real form factor so it's like a three ton two meter high stainless steel fridge basically that keeps our chips cold um it gets away from the chandelier so i think when you say quantum computing a lot of people immediately visualize the beautiful golden chandelier we got rid of that that goes in the trash and we have these like much more boring uh cryostats but yeah we're very grateful to slack for letting us uh squat in their building and steal a bit of helium uh and then yeah the main uh the main event is going to be in australia first so australia is going to have the first very large-scale machine uh just outside brisbane airport um and then the site in in chicago used to be the u.s steel site so it was a uh you know linchpin of u.s industrial might during the second world war used to make a million tons of steel a year enormous steel foundry that site has been empty for a few decades and uh obviously you know used to be furnished with enormous amounts of power water etc we're just thrilled to be uh the anchor tenant of that site to be breaking ground this year on these big systems and uh and to be surrounded by people in australia and chicago who are world-class you know scientific expertise in quantum computing error correction etc but also like bias to action and bravery so in chicago they reversed the flow of the river to make it flow out of the lake they lifted entire city blocks off of the ground like it's nothing like we needed we need to be surrounded by people with that kind of mentality when we're you know forging ahead with the kind of aggression that cyclone has okay i'm just really curious in the theme of re-industrialization i think global foundries is probably one of the most underrated companies in america yeah could you share more about your work with them and how they operate?

1:09:03Yeah. So again, like this, this is to the theme, which is that I'm still, I'm still amazed that people don't, are not more intensely focused on this thing that power is being captured on the frontier of advanced technology. Still, when you say, when you talk about, you know, So these very advanced technologies, quantum computing, semiconductor manufacturing, et cetera, still people's eyes glaze over a little bit. And it's like, you need to get with the times. Like 10 years ago, if you put a silicon wafer in front of the average politician, they didn't know what they were looking at. They'd never even heard of a semiconductor fab.

1:09:47And certainly they didn't care at all about semiconductor manufacturing. Now it's on everyone's lips. Everyone understands that the fact that TSMC is located in Taiwan is geopolitically profoundly impactful. Politicians even now know where ASML is and why ASML matters. Like that's an upgrade. That's very welcome. And I've forgotten the question. Sorry. Why is Global Factor is underrated? Yeah, that's right. So now, like politicians and investors and so on cleanly understand that you have this kind of concentration of power into a few companies, a few bleeding edge technologies and surprisingly small pieces of land.

1:10:34Like it's shocking. Yeah. If you just think about how much land does TSMC occupy, how much land does GF occupy? And the same goes for AI supercomputers. The same goes for rocket companies. These are incredibly consequential companies, and it's like a tiny plot of land. Like you can barely even see it on the map. And so, yeah, semiconductor manufacturing is firmly in that category. In the United States, we have Intel, of course, and they've been in the news I heard recently. But GF is really the last remaining pure play semiconductor, like tier one semiconductor foundry in the United States. So we offshored huge fractions of our semiconductor industry.

1:11:18As far as like a high volume 300 millimeter foundry that is making chips for industrial applications and for sort of high volume, GF is it. They're the last remaining capability. They're in upstate New York. What's their facility like? So it's this enormous fab, right? like it's, we have been working with GF for, so just zooming out, right? Like if you want to make chips, you can make chips in a university clean room. I just saw this morning somebody who's made a fab in their garden shed and you can, that's brilliant for my narrative because now you can literally make chips in your garden shed, but the quality of chip that you're going to make is very, very far removed from what you need for a useful application and so there are tiers of fab and you basically want to be in a big fab if you want to have good uniformity if you want to have high device performance and if you want a promise that you can make thousands of chips that are all the same you need to be in a tier one fab there are very few tier one fabs on the planet tsmc Global Foundries, Samsung, Intel, SMIC in China.

1:12:32There's a few others, but they're very limited. And GF is one of those. Their facility in upstate New York is a huge clean room. So, you know, you gown up and put a mask on and so on. And then there are just multi-hundred million dollar semiconductor manufacturing tools stretching as far as the eye can see. It takes 25 minutes to walk from one corner of the room to the other corner of the room. And so we had been working with these guys for like five or six years before they let me in the building. They finally let me go in there. And I've been talking about it and raging about, you know, the semiconductor industry as leverage to get us to big machines quickly.

1:13:15This has been the sort of religious belief of PsyQuantum for many years. And actually getting in that building for the final, for the first time was a religious experience. It's unbelievable just scale and dynamic range, right? Like they're making things with angstrom control on the thickness. So sub nanometer control on thickness. And then this thing, it takes 25 minutes to walk across. You've got boiling sulfuric acid. You've got wafers at thousands of degrees Celsius. You've got liquid helium at minus 270. And obviously like I'm confident in what we're doing. I've been doing this my whole adult life, but occasionally I worry about the difficulty of building a quantum computer.

1:14:02And going to that fab was hugely encouraging because you look at what humans have been able to do in a tier one foundry like that, and it makes almost everything else that we do as human beings look pathetic by comparison. It's unbelievable, the precision, the control, the extreme nature of everything that they're doing in that facility. And yeah, GF is a trusted fab. They make silicon for defense applications. They make a ton of silicon for industry. And it's really like a point of pride that we're in there. Like when I say quantum computing, again, naturally people, their brain immediately goes to a physicist in a university research lab making some crappy like demo device, which is what we were all doing, you know, five or 10 years ago.

1:14:54quantum computing and tier one foundry don't naturally belong in the same sentence. Like there's a parallel universe in which we went to GF six years ago, seven years ago. It's pretty daunting, right? To show up on the front door of a facility like this, a legendary company and say, Hey, I'm a graduate student. I want to put superconductors into your factory, please. I'm going to put quantum computing devices into your factory. There's a parallel universe in which they called security and said there's some mad people at the front door. Please have them removed from the property. And I'm glad that they didn't.

1:15:33And now that that puts us, you know, shoulder to shoulder with people who are routinely making tens of thousands of wafers, millions of chips. And that's, yeah, that's always been critical to our approach. What's so astonishing is like you have laid out such a complex supply chain and so many different touch points of just one company. How many jobs do you think this will create if, you know, Quantum does really work? Yeah, so we've shared some job numbers in Australia and Chicago, and that's really, you know, pretty specifically to support the sites that are getting built. So that's a data center-like facility.

1:16:16You can't build and operate something like that without hundreds of people. But that like is a very reductive way of looking at the jobs that are created by what what we're doing. I don't want to be a pessimist, but again, coming back to some of our earlier discussion, to me, it looks as though humanity is rapidly moving forwards on this trajectory of of like pushing the boundary of what we can do with advanced technology. And there are real risks that you stop, right? Like there are real risks that you run into a barrier of power or cooling or space or computational mode of operation. That means that you stop innovating or you stop pushing that boundary.

1:17:09And so I have no idea how you quantify the impact on the economy and jobs in that situation. But what we're trying to do is build a machine that allows us to continue on that trajectory as a nation, as a species. And yeah, if you want to grow an economy, it seems to me that you want advanced technology. And so that's obviously a very broad macroscopic view on things, but that's really how I see it. If we continue to use the same old petrochemicals, certainly the same semiconductor manufacturing processes, the same fuels, the same drugs, we're just stuck on that for the next decade. That's not a healthy situation for an economy.

1:17:58Yeah, I was talking with Pri about this and not to quote her, but some are expecting over 50 ,000 jobs created in areas of quantum manufacturing from chips to cryogenics. And that's before counting the scientists and the technologists. So like 80 % of our supply chain is in the United States. We have hundreds of companies in that supply chain here in the US. and we have obviously a further like worldwide supply chain. So I don't know the exact number, but it's hundreds and hundreds of companies that we already work with. What's an exact number? That will already extend to thousands of people who are involved in working on parts for our systems.

1:18:45And that's only going to grow. And of course, but again, I think that all pales in comparison to the broader context, which is that like how do you assign the number of jobs that we have now that we like how do you try to estimate the number of jobs that that are in the US let's say today that wouldn't exist had we not come up with high performance computing so the ability to simulate new fuels like especially things like you know fluid dynamics design of aircraft all of the stuff that we conventionally do with with with uh high performance computing erase that from history right like go back in time and say we never we never invented supercomputers what impact would that have on the number of jobs in the united states i have no idea but it's it's catastrophic to our progress as a as a species so yeah i don't know it's difficult to estimate but So I've seen quantum get framed politically over and over again as kind of like a scare tactic.

1:19:56Yeah. Everything from cybersecurity, code breaking, China, and just these like overall doom narratives. So how much of this is hype and PR versus genuine interest and progress? If you build a big enough quantum computer, you can break most of the encryption, public key encryption that we currently use on the internet. That's a fact. And actually there was a recent paper which reduces the resources required to do this quite significantly. So that is a widely publicized prospect that a big quantum computer is going to let you break encryption and read secrets. And that's completely real. there is a sort of cringeworthy thing that people do where it's just so transparent that they just imagine a big lever that says China on it and people like me who want money they think you just pull the lever and money comes out they just say China China China China and then imagine that money is just flying to the company through this mechanism like it's kind of cringeworthy and a bit lame, if you ask me, like the thing that to me is clear is like just a slightly different framing on that.

1:21:14Do you want your nation to be on the frontier of advanced technology? Do you want your nation to have the best technology? That seems like quite a straightforward question to answer. And so like the risk is real, like there is a clear technical basis for these concerns. I think sometimes the way people wield that as a sort of marketing tool is a little bit unfortunate. And then the good news on that is that as far as we understand, still despite these new architectural results, algorithmic results, you still need a bigger computer to do code breaking than you do to tackle the commercially useful applications that we talked about earlier.

1:22:01So that's good for us because I want to be rich. And as far as we know, we're going to get rich before we get dangerous. You can imagine a parallel world where for whatever reason, nature conspired such that we get dangerous before we get rich. Right. Like if the number of qubits and gates needed to break encryption was really small, it'd be really annoying because I'd have to deal with all of those like frightening geopolitical implications. before I can even buy my Ferrari. Fortunately, it's the other way around. So you should get like an economic early warning sign, essentially, where you should see quantum computing companies doing commercially impactful things, making money, and then eventually scaling towards systems that are big enough to be cryptographically relevant.

1:22:50So hopefully that helps people to sleep at night a little bit. But yeah, there is absolutely serious technical reality to these things. sometimes they're wielded in a slightly silly way. You've definitely got some support from the public side and government, but has the public side been overall very supportive to this industry? Yeah. So I think sometimes people are surprised to see like BlackRock and Bailey Gifford and people like that on our cap table. Obviously, like those guys, that category of late stage crossover type people. They were in SpaceX. They were in NVIDIA. They were in ASML when ASML was pretty crazy prospect.

1:23:36And again, like, just look at that list of companies. Like, it's not, I don't think it's as surprising as people make out. And with quantum computing, like, there is this sort of additional mystique. Every time you talk to people, they say, they kind of give up before they've even started, right? Like they say, oh, quantum computing, I can never understand this. It's just crazy, spooky action at a distance and so on and so on. I'll never understand the physics. I can't engage. When I talk to people like that, I sort of like to, my co-founder particularly likes to make the point that if you go to the average technology conference, you'll find thousands of people who are very comfortable talking about GPUs and, you know, transistors and three nanometer and so on and so on.

1:24:25And then you ask these people, OK, like you love AI, you love computers, you love GPUs. Please get on the whiteboard and explain to me how a transistor works. Like talk me through Fermi levels and electron hole pairs and the physics of a transistor. And it's like hopeless, right? Like 99 % of people, most physicists can't give you a really good explanation of how transistor works is pretty bloody involved physics and so the fact that a you know late stage crossover investor whatever is looking at quantum computing uh you can't rebut that from the point of view that you know the physics of the device is involved the same is true of transistors right like there's nothing unusual about that really and so yeah we're delighted to have that support BlackRock and various of those people have been supporters of the company for many, many years now.

1:25:19They came in at Series C. And then, you know, it's been nice to be able to show them that we've done the things we said we were going to do with their capital. And to have them continue to support the company over years like this has been very gratifying to me. Yeah. So I've heard them going to go put on a bunny suit tomorrow. Yeah. What is going on at this facility? Yeah, so this is the facility that I didn't mention in my long list of locations, but this is also in the South Bay here. We've been missing a piece, basically. So hopefully I've given you a good sales pitch that we've got the chip manufacturing at a high level of maturity and we threw away the chandelier and we're building these parts.

1:26:02We needed to switch lights, like route light with incredibly high performance. This isn't really a quantum problem. It's just an optics problem. But to do that, we had to make a new material. And so this was sort of, again, like outlier to the standard approach where we're trying to use existing stuff. We were forced to do something pretty unusual. This was a big piece of like the risk that we went after with our Series D fundraise. And so we told BlackRock and co, don't worry, we got it covered. We're just going to occupy an empty building in in San Jose. We're going to build five clean rooms in there.

1:26:47We're going to put the biggest molecular beam apataxi tool in the world ever in that facility. It's never been built before. The vendor, by the way, thinks it's a terrible idea for us to do this and it's not going to work. Various of our employees think it's not going to work. And then what we're going to do is we're going to have molten titanium at a few thousand degrees Celsius. We're going to have liquid helium at minus 270 degrees, same temperature as deep space. We're going to expose them to the same vacuum chamber. And then we're going to grow essentially perfect material that nobody else can make on a giant wafer.

1:27:22We're going to do it clean enough that we can then FedEx that up to New York to put into global foundries. And then we're going to have our device. And the shipping company actually dropped the main chamber, I think, up in Alameda and broke it during COVID. Oh, my God. So we had some drama in bringing that thing online. But yeah, huge risk for the company. New material science, never before demonstrated tool, requirement to get that into the highest level of maturity of chip manufacturing that exists. and a lot of trust put in us by those Series D investors. And it's just been a wonderful thing.

1:28:04So we now make that material with essentially perfect properties. We ship it off to GF, we integrate it into the flow, and we make these switches. And we need that for quantum computing. They're beyond state-of-the-art in performance. They're published in Nature a few months ago. But when we published that paper in Nature, I think it was something like 14 regular optical networking and semiconductor companies rang up Global Foundries asking how they could get access to that material because it is basically the strongest optical material known to science. We're the only people in the world who make that on a 300 millimeter wafer.

1:28:43So you're going to go and see that tool and get in the clean room. And if our yield goes down or if our quality goes down in a few weeks time, I'll know who to blame. It'll be me. So like logistically, this might be a dumb question, but do you need like armored cars to ship this across America? Like it gets bumpy. How do you ship these? We FedEx. Just like a straight up FedEx truck? Yeah. The semiconductor industry is pretty amazing. There's a lot that goes under the hoods that would blow people's minds. I mean, we're also... So that material is a very special material. There are a few other people who make it around the world, but we're the only people who make it on a big wafer like this.

1:29:31But then that's getting integrated with other components at Global Foundries that we also design and where our team is located in the fab doing that development. I was very gratified when invited to go and testify to Congress to be able to tell them that our company has spent north of$100 million on sovereign semiconductor manufacturing in the United States. And a lot of that has been those components at GF. And all of that stuff has to work in concert. So like, you know, PsyQuantum is obviously a company that has to take security really, really seriously. quantum computing is a dual use sovereign strategic capability.

1:30:14We red team our IT systems, we leave USB sticks in the parking lot, we work with the three letter agencies, we do, you know, all of the, you know, basic hygiene and, and steps that you would imagine that we take. And that helps me to sleep at night. But the thing that really helps me sleep at night is that we are ahead on a really, really complex, incredibly technically challenging technology. And you've seen actually some of these companies, they publish their patents, right? Like you saw that from Elon a few years back. That's a familiar kind of stance to me because we have a ton of IP. The IP is awesome, but really the thing that makes me feel strong is that we're the only company in the world who is actually capable of executing on this stuff.

1:31:05We're ahead and we've got our foot on the gas pedal, not least thanks to this recent funding round. So, you know, in addition to all of that kind of hygiene and security work, the main responsibility on the company is just to be ahead, move faster, execute better. And so currently we're able to do that on that material and on those devices. Yeah. So what is PsyQuantum's role in reindustrialization? Yeah. So I think twofold. Firstly, we're actually doing it today. We're laying concrete, cutting steel, building parts in concert with hundreds of companies here in the United States, 80 % US based supply chain, everything from the angstrom to the kilometer, right?

1:31:57Like we're spending hundreds of millions of dollars making chips, making big metal boxes, flowing helium, doing, you know, breakthrough work on quantum algorithms and quantum error correction. very high dynamic range. Like that's one of the joys of the company is that we have everything from extremely rare, elite, mathematically oriented people who do the algorithms and architecture work through to people who are, you know, laying a hundred thousand square feet of concrete and putting walls up, everything in between. We're doing that today. We're not just talking about it in the future. Like we already do that stuff.

1:32:34We just tore up the floor here in in the South Bay. We just had a cryo plant arrive, which I think maybe you're going to see later today or hopefully soon. We've put 10 shipping container semiconductor manufacturing tools into GF. Like we're doing it. We've already done it. But then, yeah, in the future context, again, we really hope that the quantum computer is this kind of fountain of knowledge, engine for innovation that allows this country and our species to move forwards beyond what otherwise I think look like boundaries to continued progress. If we can't deterministically design the microscopic foundations of our world, I think it's really difficult to just continue.

1:33:21And we see that so clearly with semiconductors, right? Like we're coming to the end of Moore's law, we cannot make smaller transistors, that's going to get really, really painful in the next decade. And so a future industrial environment, I think, is hugely benefited by the existence of a big quantum computer. I want to talk a little bit about your sanity through all of this, because this is based on the previous 90 minutes of discussion. Yeah, yeah. I'm a little concerned. Yeah. No, but so. So am I, actually. You are a little bit. Yeah. Why? You only get one reference point in life, you know, like this has been my entire adult life.

1:34:10When I start talks these days, like public talks, I like to start by showing an image of a black hole. It's a beautiful historic image of a simulated black hole that was done by a French gentleman Jean-Pierre Lumier. And that was done on an IBM punch card computer. So there was no display on these systems. You look at this image and it's clearly hand painted. So this French guy got hold of an IBM punch card machine and spent presumably a very long time feeding punch cards in getting numbers out and then with a paintbrush and india ink and a canvas painting the data that was coming out of the system and it's this stunning picture of a black hole um very similar to the images that you see in uh in interstellar um but done decades prior and of course decades before human beings ever actually saw a black hole uh directly um must have been like, must've been astonishing feeling to see that image appear.

1:35:19Um, but I show that, uh, both as a sort of testament to the power of seemingly primitive computers, you know, that's a really primitive looking machine relative to what we have on our desk today. Um, but it's still showing us a glimpse of something, you know, unfathomably far away in our universe. but also as a sort of allegory for the way that quantum computing has acted on the lives of people like me it's very rare that you have a technical goal like this where quantum computing has already consumed billions and billions and billions of dollars of capital it has consumed the entire adult life of tens of thousands of our best scientists and researchers some total has got to be nearly a hundred thousand years of human life, billions of capital and, you know, inordinate amount of time has been thrown into the pit of quantum computing.

1:36:20And, uh, that's, it's a sinister, I'd show you it deliberately as a sinister image, right? Like so far we have made this huge investment and we don't have useful quantum computers today. Uh, we know that it's possible to build these machines. Like it is definitely physically possible. And so, yeah, I feel a huge responsibility that we make this successful. And I'm very lucky that we have a real shot on goal to do it. But yeah, it's a big responsibility and a pretty weird technology to be involved in. I think, you know, one thing that really helps with the sanity is that, like so many things, you can look at quantum computing through two lenses.

1:37:02One lens is this is alien technology from outer space, baffling physics, spooky action at a distance, mysterious, et cetera, et cetera. And then there's another perspective that I think is pretty helpful, which is what are we really doing? And especially when you talk to people and they say, like, why in Brisbane, Australia? Or they say, why in Chicago? And to those people, I always sort of say, like, what are we doing? We're building a big computer, big, ugly building scale computer. We're building it through collaboration of private industry and public funds. And we're doing it outside of the capital city of the nation, right?

1:37:48Like you're not building it in, in downtown, downtown Washington, DC or Times Square or something. You're building it somewhere else. and it's going to be operated by scientists and it's going to give us a view into the future of what we do with technology. That story is a story that's decades old. People have been building leadership class supercomputers for a very long time and usually people don't care about them and that's fine. Like nobody cared prior to GPT-3, nobody cared that Azure and Microsoft and OpenAI were building big, ugly computers. Like nobody even thought about that. They only care about the output.

1:38:29And so for the average person, I hope that they never care about our quantum computer, that they never even think that there's this pretty nondescript looking warehouse sitting out there next to the airport or on the south side of Chicago. But I really hope that one day they use a drug or a fuel or a fertilizer or a material or some technology that simply would not have existed without the lens and the simulation capability that quantum computing is going to give us. Rex, since you're such a big fan, and I think you're converting over pretty soon, they're all about spending smarter, moving faster.

1:39:07How have you as a company thought about doing all of these things in the most efficient way possible? How do you think about performance as a company? Back to the 80s, uh silicon valley hardware company dna uh bad coffee polystyrene ceiling tiles dilapidated former conference rooms converted to lab space like to me as a as a uh immigrant to silicon valley that stuff is so cool that stuff is like legendary right like that you walk into some space that isn't polished and beautiful with a you know ten thousand dollar coffee machine and bean bags and massages but you walk into somewhere pretty grim and find the most astonishing technology being built by the most legendary people like that ethos is embedded in the in in psyquantum partly deliberately and partly simply by virtue of being a chip company i think that kind of comes with the territory to some extent because chip manufacturing is bloody expensive.

1:40:14I think more recently, we have a bit more scope than that. Like we have a little bit more dynamic range. Obviously, we now have this wonderful new facility in the South Bay that is a massive order of magnitude step up from where we have been for the last eight years. And then we don't only do chips. We also have algorithms people. We have theory people. We have special people at the company. But yeah, to me, it's pretty cool to have that kind of pretty thrifty, pretty modest approach to our environment in which we're operating. I think that's traditional for hardware companies. And what's your favorite flavor of chip that you make?

1:41:01Favorite. So actually, I don't know whether this is public or not. It's probably not. I have to save that one. Favorite flavor of chip. We did actually have a visitor who will remain nameless, but knows who he is, who came to see the BTO wafer. So the BTO wafer, you're going to see it tomorrow. It's like it's just a blue disk. But the blue on that disk is a very special blue. It's made with the strongest electro-optic material known to science. and that's a really special object, right? Like there are very few of those ever been made in the world and took us a ton of blood, sweat and tears to be able to make that.

1:41:45After this visitor came, he left and texted. I think he tweeted that he'd just seen the wafer. And then he was asking the Internet whether he should have licked it or not. Oh, my God. And we're never letting him back in the building, unfortunately. me but uh that we yeah i think i think it's probably fine so you could find out if you licked it or not you could find out how bto tastes oh i could do a taste test you could do a taste test we could line them up yeah the um there is the the obviously the human uh taste uh capability is is borderline science fiction in terms of like how good it is and this is how you do quality testing and so on.

1:42:30Yeah. No, I mean, I just like, you asked about my sanity earlier, right? Like I came out here a decade ago and I fully expected to be sent home packing with a failed company six months later. And I've never, I've never done this before. I've never founded a company before. The only real job I've ever had is stacking compost in a garden center. And so it is daunting to me to go to like the biggest pure play foundry in the United States to go to the Blackrocks and, you know, all of this stuff that is just so far from my prior experience and make these claims. Yeah, yeah. We're going to put superconductors into a commercial semiconductor foundry.

1:43:17It's going to be fine. We're going to build this clean room and we're going to grow epitaxial barium titanate on a silicon wafer. Uh, this architecture is like 10 ,000 times too bad right now, but we're just going to make it better at a geometric rate for seven years running. Don't worry. The next seven years, we're just going to progressively make that architecture better. We're going to keep innovating, whatever, like it's daunting to make those claims. and it is a you know personal joy and uh and treat to be able to then come back to those people a few years later and say that we actually did it so when i look at those wafers that you've seen in our in our facility and i think about the fact that there's 35 layers of stuff on that wafer that there's a superconducting material inside and that it was made in a commercial foundry next to regular chips.

1:44:10Yeah, it's a pretty special feeling. I love that stuff. It's awesome. I have to ask you the question you don't want to be asked. Please. When do you think the first useful quantum computer will be developed? Yeah, so it's a great question. I would ask people not to try to nail it down to the week, which they sometimes do. Like, get real. This is a big, very difficult infrastructure project. We need to get down to the day. The plan of record that the company marches to is that we want to have that site enabled by end of 2027 in Australia. That's what we march people to. That is an incredibly difficult thing to do.

1:44:49That's a really aggressive timeline. But we've done well as a company historically by driving people to, you know, the most aggressive timeline that we can reasonably stomach. And that's what Silicon Valley companies do. That's part of the value proposition of a startup is that we're willing to try to do things extremely quickly. And we have done that historically. If you look at claims that we've made about standing up a completely new manufacturing flow at GF or standing up this BTO material or building these high power cryostats, I keep a pretty good record of claims that we've made historically.

1:45:27And I think we do a pretty good job of sticking to those claims, especially given the novelty and the difficulty and so on of what we do. But then also to rationalize that claim. Again, I'd go back to Jensen's comment, right? Like, OK, you've got to scale up by 10 ,000 X. That's 20 or 30 years. XAI, Colossus supercomputer built in 112 days. you know, much kind of bigger system than what we're building in many ways. We're not going to build this thing in 112 days, obviously. We know limits on the speed with which we can commission the cryo plant and, you know, various other sort of constraints.

1:46:11But, you know, going five or ten times slower than that, that sounds pretty reasonable to me. And that's essentially what we're trying to do. If you think about that timeline, I don't know, six times slower or something than Elon. That feels like a reasonable ambition for a company like ours. It was funny. I tweeted out this Calci market, which currently has before 2027 at 18%, 2030 at 30%, 2035 at 45%, and before 2040 at 55%. And one of the comments on it was by Martin Shkreli. Yeah. And he said, as the CEO of Rigetti famously said, define useful. Yeah. So I mean, like defining useful capitalism has a pretty helpful assist on that, which is that when you're making a ton of revenue, you're probably doing something that, you know, within reason you could call useful.

1:47:08And like a billion dollars of revenue would be a nice starting point for a useful machine like this. um uh yeah definitely what is not useful is pure pedagogical science like learning which is what people are currently doing with quantum computers it's valuable it's important to move uh towards useful machines but it's not commercially useful and that's what we mean by useful um but also like the polymark it's on polymarket no it's on calci oh what they have a big rivalry Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. Okay. Calci. Well, I would have loved to see, I think they didn't have Calci or Polymarket before, like they didn't have those, what did they exist prior?

1:48:01Well, they weren't like popular prior to like GPT-3 or prior to Waymo becoming real. Calci just first got regulated like in the last year. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, people were talking about it decades ago, obviously, but like this wave of people really using those systems, I think would have been fascinating to see what that looked like. If you ask people about like about like the Turing test, for instance, prior to GPT-3, or if you ask them about self-driving five years ago, I guess, would have been pretty interesting to see what people say. Dialing into NVIDIA and how Jensen apologized. I'm not sure he actually apologized.

1:48:42He walked back on his comments of when he thinks the timeline for quantum will actually come to pass. And I think one of the interesting points that I gleaned from that is he seemed to be confused. And so he actually positioned it as more of like a branding and marketing problem for quantum. And I think like this new wave of AI and technology and frontier tech that is taking on a new language and marketing positioned is probably like an opportunity for more language in quantum. I don't know if that makes sense, but to quote him, he said, I do wonder whether quantum computing is simply poorly positioned because it was described as a quantum computer instead of a quantum instrument, which is a little bit contentious for some people.

1:49:29And then he added, there's a common sense about what a computer is. It has to have memory. It has to have networks. It has to have storage. It should be able to read and write. But there's a programming model associated with computers. I wonder if it's just a wrong mental model. What do you think about the positioning of quantum as it's evolved through time? And how should it be labeled today? I think that Jensen's use of the word instrument is very sensible, and it's pretty instructive, actually. When people think of computer, like the average person, they think of laptop, cell phone, something like that.

1:50:14the applications of quantum computing are similar to the applications of high performance computing. They're about seeing into the future or about seeing into some system that you otherwise can't access. And so thinking about a quantum computer as a telescope or a lens or an instrument or a measuring device or something. That's a very helpful analogy just to differentiate from PowerPoint and Microsoft Excel and TikTok, right? Like it's really got nothing to do with that stuff. Although TikTok would be really, quantum TikTok would be really good. But yeah, so I think that's, like I've said earlier, I really worry that CEOs of these hyperscalers and leadership here in Silicon Valley, I worry that they're going to get completely detached from reality on what quantum computing is for.

1:51:16And I've actually been honestly pretty impressed that they know you need about a million qubits. They know you need error correction. They know that it's not for PowerPoint and Excel. And these guys have got 20 other things of extreme high priority that they need to be thinking about. So I'm actually pretty relaxed that they basically understand the nature of what's going on. The same maybe cannot be said for some of the public market investors. And it's pretty striking, let's say, that there are now public quantum computing companies where anybody can get a view. But the other thing on that is that I'm fully on board with the instrument language.

1:52:03Okay. I think that's really, really helpful. Um, as far as marketing of quantum computing and positioning and so on, um, again, I'll just emphasize that the number of people who directly interface with the products of TSMC, ASML, SpaceX, NVIDIA, like how many people do a tape out of TSMC? How many people run an ASML EUV machine is minuscule number of people. And so there are these giant companies where their contact point with the outside world is incredibly narrow. We are categorically one of those companies. The downstream effects we think are profound, but the direct interaction with the company is very narrow.

1:52:49And so I would love to be able to do this without any publicity. It would be awesome. And it feels as though you should be able to develop technologies like this and get them funded and get them built without some giant marketing campaign. And we generally have, you know, bias towards not spending a lot of time on TV and in the newspapers. But quantum computing is also so kind of thought provoking and exciting to people. and we think ultimately profoundly impactful and determining factor in all sorts of things that there's no getting away from the fact that people really care about it and they want to understand it and they want to hear about it.

1:53:35And so, yeah, messaging it carefully is a sacred responsibility that falls on leaders of these companies, people like myself, et cetera. It's a delicate thing to get right, yeah. As we wrap up, what are you most looking forward to in the next year? In the next year? I mean, hopefully we'll break ground on these sites. That's going to be a pretty special experience having been thinking about building these systems for 15 plus years of my life and 20 plus years of my co-founders lives. To actually be able to point at the piece of land where we're building these systems is going to be special. And then also, as I said, we've up until very recently been kind of grinding away in a pretty small, not fit for purpose kind of space, suddenly expanded into this much bigger facility.

1:54:31And so that is now just like a engine of activity, hive of activity. That's just thrilling to be close to that. Like it was completely empty six months ago. We've now got a cryo plant there. We've ripped up the floor. We've laid concrete. We're putting fiber attached tools into a clean room space. Suddenly there's 100 plus people in the building, like just seeing the pace of that. And, you know, I've been doing this for a long, long, long time. It's very difficult. You're always staring, you know, at the top of Everest and in moments of depression or frustration or whatever, always the good thing to do is just go to the lab, go and see the people who are actually doing stuff.

1:55:17It always cheers me up. They always have something that I didn't know they were doing. And, you know, one of the exciting things about quantum computing for me is that when I look at conventional computing, as we've discussed, it looks as though there is still some life in it there's still great progress to be made but it is also clear clearly coming to the end of life right like Moore's law is over we're turning on nuclear power stations that'll get us so far but you know how much further can we go with conventional computing it looks a little worrying and this year Jensen will build an AI supercomputer and he'll look back on that 10 years from now and say, that's a pretty good system.

1:56:04Like it's a pretty bad ass system. With quantum computing, we're really at the very beginning. We're really early. And so when we build our parts for our systems today, when we build those systems in Australia and Chicago, we're going to look back on that two years in and we're going to say, man, those were horrible systems. Why did we design it like that? you know, this was completely, you know, inefficient use of space or power or whatever. And we're already thick into that, which to me looks like the early days of the microelectronics industry or of mainframes or of conventional computing, where every month you're looking at what you did the previous month and saying that was stupid.

1:56:48We should make it smaller. We should make it higher density. We can reduce errors. So to be on a gradient like that is life-giving and privilege yeah it's a great answer well pete it was a pleasure to have you on thank you so much i really appreciate it we didn't have to like you know refill the batteries every so often we could just keep on going yeah do you think you have it in you what if we it's lunchtime get some lunch and then crack back on might as well great well thank you so much for coming on and congratulations on the announcement and the big funding thank you huge privilege hey it's molly if you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter, sorcery.bc, where we deliver a once a week top deals and tech headlines email, and also go deeper on our podcast interviews.

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