University of Queensland professor Andrew White could tell his postdoc student had itchy feet. It was 2004, and they had just become the first in the world to demonstrate an “unambiguously entangled quantum logic gate”—the initial step in building a quantum computer. The professor knew he had no budget to keep the student, Jeremy O’Brien, at the university, so he threw a job ad for an academic role in the UK onto O’Brien’s desk. White got on the phone to a senior professor at the University of Bristol and told him: “I’ve got this great young bloke called Jeremy. I’ll just warn you though, [soon] you’ll be working for him.” Three years later, O’Brien was building a quantum mini-empire at Bristol that would grow to 100 people, all working on how to build a quantum computer, drawn by its promise of changing the world through incomprehensible computational power. The Bristol team’s work was spun off in 2016 as Silicon Valley startup PsiQuantum, into which investors poured $665 million, valuing the company at $3.15 billion in mid-2023. It got a whole lot more valuable in April, when O’Brien convinced Australia’s federal and Queensland governments to spend A$940 million ($632 million)—split between equity and loans—for PsiQuantum to build the world’s first useful quantum computer in Brisbane by 2027. Then, in July, PsiQuantum announced the Illinois state government in the US offered $500 million in tax incentives for it to build a second computer in Chicago by 2028, and tipped in another $200 million to build a cryogenic plant to the company’s specifications.

Full report : The Silicon Valley unicorn PsiQuantum received $632 million in funding from Australian government to build the first usable quantum computer in Brisbane.