Sachin and Adam
00:19:24 · Pete Shadbolt
[00:19:24] S0: Quantum computing is like a crazy field in that there's all these different teams. They're all really well funded, and they're literally using different physics to build the qubit. This is different to, like, the AI accelerator chip companies where there's differences in architecture, but at least they agree on, like, transistors and silicon. We're, like, so much further from that, where this person is using atoms floating around and this person's using light and then that person is using electrons floating on helium. And it creates this, like, incredibly combative competitive landscape where everyone is trying to argue their approach is the best, and everyone else's approach is, like, horrible, never gonna work. It's kind of silly. But with photons, the reason that we always liked photons was not because of the qubit. Photons are actually a pretty annoying qubit. They're hard to entangle. They don't interact. Light doesn't interact. If I just cross two laser beams, nothing happens. The reason that we always were compelled by photons is that they scale. And this was again with the understanding that we're only interested in getting to the scale necessary for real impactful applications. When you think about building a million qubit machine, you got to take into account manufacturability. How do we manufacture, test and yield millions to billions of devices? You can't do that in a university clean room. You can't do that with exotic materials or atomic scale fabrication or various of the science fiction characteristics that we normally associate with quantum computing. You've to think about networking. You can't fit a million qubits on a chip. With one or two notable exceptions, you're going to have to network chips together. And with photons, can network using standard telco optical fiber. We can just send the photon through fiber, no transduction. We do a two fifty meter qubit link in The UK with 99.7% fidelity. That was basically three or four people who put that together. Actually kind of easy to do. We don't need the extreme cooling of a superconducting qubit. So Google and IBM systems, which are amazingly impressive, they're running at 10 millikelvin, so oneone hundredth of the temperature of deep space. We can run at a few Kelvin, so 100 times warmer.
00:21:57 · Pete Shadbolt
That gives us about a million times more thermal budget in terms of the cooling power at base temperature. And so these are kind of scaling considerations that if you think about it, are closer to what we're familiar with in data centers manufacturing, cooling, networking, control. That was all the motivation for photonics as opposed to the qubit itself. And there were some major unlocks that happened with photonic quantum computing really early on, and a lot of that work was actually done in Australia. So there was a 2001 paper from a bunch of theorists. They actually set out to prove that photonic quantum computing wouldn't work, And to their own surprise, they found the first architecture that showed that you could do this. And then my co founder Jeremy actually did the first two qubit gate for photons in Brisbane about twenty five years ago. And we're derived from all of that work. But yeah, it was always really attractive in the context that you have to build a big machine.
00:23:04 · Adam Miller
[00:23:04] S3: You mentioned before that it feels like an unpleasant journey because you've got to build such a huge machine, and you've got to wait a long time until there's this sort of commercial progress, and starting any company is hard, but this is like starting a company on absolute steroids. What are the sort of parts of your personal journey that would get us to understand why you're sort of so excited to take on this unpleasant journey? Like, what is it within you that makes you want to strive to be on this journey for decades that milestones keep on getting pushed back and there's all this skepticism and stuff? What keeps you energized on this journey?
00:23:43 · Pete Shadbolt
[00:23:43] S0: Yeah, so firstly, it's not actually an unpleasant journey, and secondly, we're hell bent on not making it very long. Always the thesis with photonics was that we would leverage the big fabs, the exact same semiconductor supply chain that builds 100,000 GPUs for Elon and allows them to put that cluster together in one hundred and twelve days, that same machinery, we're putting that to work to build a photonic quantum computer. And we think that gives us a much faster path to machines that have real impact. And we see that, you know, the wafers that you guys have seen, those are built at the highest level of maturity of chip manufacturing that exists. They're built in a 700,000 square foot fab that normally builds laptops and cell phones. And we can make basically as many of those wafers as we could ever dream of. That's a level of leverage and scale that we've dreamt about for our entire professional lives and we're really at that point now. And then in terms of like the unpleasantness, I think what I mean by that is just there's a lazy, easy thing to do in quantum computing. We were all and I speak for the field we were all successful academics, right? Like all quantum computing companies come out of university research groups and we all got really good at publishing papers. And there's a pretty straightforward career path where you finish your postdoc and you go and raise a bit of money and you just keep publishing papers. And you do a venture backed research group and you keep kicking out press releases and you show a cool, interesting system. We could have done that. It would have been pretty easy. We had small processes running, but that's just not getting us anywhere. We had to go and spend hundreds of millions of dollars and do a 35 layer tape out on a 300 millimeter processor at Big Fab if we were ever gonna actually convince ourselves that we're building a quantum computer. And and I think that that was the key is that we just got fed up of not really putting our money where our mouth was. And so actually, it feels great to be every day knowing that we're solving the real challenges associated with building a really big, valuable machine. And it's the privilege of my bloody life to get involved in the scale and the magnitude and the madness of this company. This company has done absolutely insane shit.
00:26:22 · Pete Shadbolt
Like, you know, five years ago, we went to BlackRock and Temasek and Baillie Gifford, these huge late stage investors, and we said, Guys, we're going to build the biggest molecular beam epitaxy tool in the world. No one has ever built this before. The vendor thinks it's pretty stupid to try. It's going to have molten titanium in it at a few thousand degrees Celsius. It's also going to have liquid helium at minus two seventy degrees. They're exposed to the same vacuum chamber. We're going to do epitaxial growth of a new optical material. We're going to do that at a level of maturity that we can then take that wafer, put it into a commercial semiconductor fab next to laptops and cell phones and build the best optical switches in the world. And we laid out a three year roadmap to do that. Half our engineering team is coming to us saying, this is just insane. You can't promise this. This is stupid. This is so dangerous. We designed the tool. During COVID, the shipping company actually managed to damage the tool in the Alameda Bay. So we were late, to your point, with delivery of that tool here in the Bay Area. Nightmares, right? Like late nights, screaming, shouting, you name it. We got the tool up and running. We managed to make films. We figured out how to do lithography. We got the material into fab. And today we make these switches, which are the best optical switches in the world for our use case. And we actually ended up delivering those ahead of schedule two times over. And that sort of experience of, like, the blood and the screaming and the shouting and then delivering the thing at the end, we've done that a number of times now in this company and it's about the most rewarding thing I can imagine doing in my life. It's been unbelievable. Yeah. And that's the real... That's the reality of building stuff that's actually valuable. Like, you think TSMC, ASML, SpaceX, you think... You you know, like, there was a point at which Elon had blown up too many rockets and he was right at the edge of collapsing that thing. And there are similar stories for TSMC, for ASML, etcetera. That's that's how you end up with the companies that define our advanced society. And we're not there yet, but we've got strong ambitions of getting there, yeah.
00:28:56 · Sachin, Pete Shadbolt, Adam Miller
[00:28:56] S1: Do you think your trajectory to date would surprise people that knew you in your early childhood or your parents? [00:29:02] S0: Yeah. I mean, there's just this sort of this thing where people are it's Silicon Valley cliche that people are generally over optimistic on short timelines and under optimistic on a long timeline. And actually, you really see that in this company. Like, when you're in the thick of building the thing, as you say, it's perpetual disappointment and frustration and failure and broken parts and delayed schedules and you name it. But then when you zoom out, you realize that the thing actually is on track and it's getting there and it's getting built. We got three Cryostats up and running here. And, yeah, it's a very similar story actually with AI, very similar story with self driving, with any number of these these hard technologies. And so, yeah, I love taking my friends and family and former academic colleagues and showing them what what we've done. And, yeah, you know, when when I was a university academic, a lot of the stuff that we've been able to do here, people much older and wiser than me told me I would never see it in my lifetime. And so that's a pleasure. That's a joy. [00:30:20] S3: The goal of the company is, I mean, it's fairly simple in terms of what you're trying to achieve, the world's first useful quantum computer, 1,000,000 qubits. [00:30:29] S1: If [00:30:30] S3: we're to take stock where the company is right now, where are you along that journey of reaching that goal?