Photograph of Diraq's silicon spin qubit chip reflected in a foundry fabricated silicon wafer
Funding of up to US$300 million will support independent verification and validation of Diraq's path to utility-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computing under DARPA's Quantum Benchmarking Initiative.
Diraq today announced it has been selected by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to advance to Stage C of the agency’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI), the final stage of the world’s most rigorous program evaluating whether any quantum computing approaches can achieve utility-scale operation by 2033.
Utility scale is the point at which a quantum computer can solve problems which deliver more value than the machine costs to build and run. In Stage C, Diraq will work with DARPA’s independent verification and validation team to assess the design and performance of its silicon-based systems and the critical capabilities required to deliver a utility-scale quantum computer.
"Advancing to Stage C of the QBI program represents a crucial independent validation that our path to utility-scale quantum computing holds up under rigorous technical scrutiny,” said Andrew Dzurak, Diraq Founder and CEO. “Diraq’s silicon spin qubits are built using the same manufacturing processes and infrastructure that already produce the world's conventional computer chips, which is a different starting point than approaches that require entirely new fabrication techniques to reach scale. That gives Diraq a decisive advantage: we are scaling on a manufacturing base that already exists, while others are still working out how to build one.”
Diraq’s advancement follows the successful completion of Stage B. During Stage B, Diraq developed and detailed its research and development plan for reaching utility scale, including the technical risks, mitigation strategies, and risk-reduction prototypes required to progress its silicon quantum computing architecture.
Over the coming months, Diraq will deliver a series of technical demonstrations, system updates, and design activities aimed at validating critical capabilities needed for its future utility-scale quantum computing platform. The program will also support the expansion of specialized research infrastructure and testing environments that enable more advanced experimentation and system development. An initial US$51 million funding tranche will support the next year of Diraq's path to a utility-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer.
"The quantum computing race will mirror the evolution of the semiconductor industry, and the winners will be decided by manufacturing economics," said Scott McGregor, Diraq Chairman and former CEO of Broadcom. "Stage C is where that gets tested rather than asserted. DARPA is examining whether the cost and manufacturability hold up, which is exactly the test the industry should be applying."
Diraq has already demonstrated high-fidelity silicon spin qubits manufactured using an industrial 300mm CMOS-compatible process and, more recently, the coherent operation of an eight-qubit array fabricated using the same process. These advances set the stage for the company to rapidly scale to 150,000 qubits by 2029, an acceleration made possible by the foundry compatibility of silicon spin qubits.
This scaling will culminate in Diraq achieving utility scale by 2031—two years ahead of the QBI schedule—with more than 2 million physical qubits on a single chip.
The first step toward that scale is already underway. Last month Diraq announced that it will deploy the world's first silicon spin quantum computer to operate in a shared commercial data centre, with Equinix in Sydney, Australia, before the end of 2026.
