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American quantum computing startup PsiQuantum announced last week that it has cracked a significant puzzle on the road to making the technology useful: manufacturing quantum chips in large quantities. PsiQuantum burst out of stealth mode in 2021 with a blockbuster funding announcement. It followed up with two more last year. The company uses so-called “photonic” quantum computing, which has long been dismissed as impractical. The approach, which encodes data in individual particles of light, offers some compelling advantages—low noise, high-speed operation, and natural compatibility with existing fiber-optic networks. However, it was held back by extreme hardware demands to manage the fact photons fly with blinding speed, get lost, and are hard to create and detect. PsiQuantum now claims to have addressed many of these difficulties. Last week, in a new peer-reviewed paper published in Nature, the company unveiled hardware for photonic quantum computing they say can be manufactured in large quantities and solves the problem of scaling up the system.