Sachin and Adam
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?
00:30:37 · Pete Shadbolt
[00:30:37] S0: Yeah, so the machine looks like a supercomputer. It's a big building. It's full of racks. The rack is full of chips, and then the chips are wired together with optical fiber. We can make the chips. We make them at the highest level of maturity of chip manufacturing that exists. There's no next step. The performance in some cases is good enough. Some of the other components not quite good enough yet. And so we're continuing to improve that component performance, but we're on a really good trajectory there. We feel real good about that. And we have all of the devices like it's feature complete. Right now, as we sit here, there are three racks sitting next door. And these are like three meter high liquid helium cooled racks. Each rack supports hundreds of chips, kind of like the racks you'd find in a data center. And we've been running chips inside that kind of system for a few years now. So that works, the cooling works, the networking works. And at the moment we're in the business of loading thousands of photon sources into those cryostats. That's our Alpha system. When we've got that thing up and running, that will be a huge milestone for the company and that will basically be something where you can look at it and say, okay, if we improve the few component specs remaining according to the plan that we've had for a long time and if we just basically add more racks, this thing is going to become a full scale system. And so, yeah, right now we're in the middle of integration hell of the mechanical failures and the electrical failures and everything that happens when you build a system two orders of magnitude bigger than anything that's ever been constructed. But none of that is really rocket science. None of that is new technology. It's just really complex and a big step up in scale. And so this system, I think, is going to be hugely significant as a prototype for then the next systems that we're building next year in Chicago and then of course the really big system that we're building in Australia. But yeah, I'm extremely encouraged by the device performance, the system performance, the networking, the cooling, the manufacturing, all of these parts of the puzzle are really coming together. And it remains the hardest technical challenge that humans have ever really undertaken.
00:33:22 · Pete Shadbolt, Sachin, Sachin
But we just keep knocking down these milestones, improving the numbers, and we're going to get it done. [00:33:31] S2: It inevitable that it does happen? [00:33:33] S0: Yeah. Unless, you know, it a full answer [00:33:39] S1: or a technical answer?
00:33:41 · Pete Shadbolt
[00:33:41] S0: Well, that's my technical assessment. Yeah. You know, that's my best technical assessment, is that you can definitely build a quantum computer. You can definitely build a photonic quantum computer. And there's thousands of hard things along the road. But again, I'm mostly encouraged by the experience that I've had in the last decade of this company. And I want to emphasize, right, like so many of the things that we've done, when we first put that to our engineers, okay, you got to get down to a 0.1 dB per meter of losses in the waveguide. You've got to take a superconducting single photon detector. You've got to put that in a chip, not in your university clean room, but in a commercial fab where the engineers are mean and they don't care about how cool your device is, and you've to be able to make millions of them, and you've got to hit, like, 99% detector... You know, some of this stuff, when we put that to our team members, they were, like, nearly mutiny ing. Right? Like, this is ridiculous. It's just not gonna happen. We're not gonna hit the schedule. Leadership are foolish. Whatever. And they've... Credit to them. Got on with it and then went and delivered on those things. And, you know, sometimes they're a little late. Sometimes they're actually a little early. Sometimes they're a little under spec, sometimes it takes them a little longer, but they did that stuff. And and so having that decade of witnessing the company overcome these, like, you know, almost unbelievable, difficult technical accomplishments. That... That's the basis for my optimism and belief that there's just no reason you you shouldn't be able to do this. And the right thing to do is to not wring your hands and spend your time worrying about how difficult it is and just get on and do it. And that's always how we have success in this company. From one point of view, quantum computing is alien technology. We're going to build huge entangled states that humans have never seen before on this planet. And there are aspects of the physics that remain baffling to our best theorists. But on the other hand, our chip, that's a 45 nanometer fab process. That's like my grandmother's fab process. You take that to TSMC, it's like an ancient, you know, nineties fab process.
00:36:05 · Pete Shadbolt, Adam Miller
And then, you know, the cabinets, they look really cool, but they're basically just chunks of steel welded together. It's a big metal box. It's rather insulting to our cryogenic engineers, but I think they would support that. You know, there's two points of view on the thing. On the one hand, it's alien technology. On the other hand, it's silicon, steel, fiber, you know, helium. Build it, put it together, make it work, fix the problems. Like, that's how we get this thing built, and that's generally the attitude that we try to have at the company. [00:36:41] S3: In AI at the moment, there's obviously a whole swath of national security and geopolitical concerns. [00:36:48] S0: Yeah. [00:36:48] S3: Whether it's Anthropic and the Department of War or people talking about supposed race between America and China and who's going to have the best models, what will they use them for? When quantum computers get developed, what will that race look like geopolitically, and what do you think the national security concerns will be?