The Logi(sti)cal Qubit
There’s a peculiar moment in the history of any transformative technology when the hardest problem stops being pure science and starts being logistical. The fundamental science questions have been proven, the first prototypes hold up, the proof of concept exists, and now someone has to build a place to take it all to the next level. We enter the factory phase.
Alice & Bob has reached that moment.
Today we are taking you inside our new facility, one of the largest quantum engineering labs in Europe. Well, “lab” might actually be the wrong word here. Up to now we have been operating in a true lab-environment, with the Eiffel tower for a backdrop – check it out on Google Maps!
For this next phase, we are expanding.
We have built production infrastructure, on a pre-industrial scale.
What does that look like you may ask?
In this new facility, we can house not three, but twenty dilution refrigerators.
We built a dedicated cleanroom designed not just to fabricate research samples, but to produce the next most advanced generations of our cat-qubit processors.
There is space to run dozens of chips simultaneously, in communication with each other, in real time.
The video tells the story of this space through the people who built it.
We wanted to add one thing the video doesn’t say explicitly: why this facility exists at all, and what problem it actually solves.
The reproducibility problem
Ask any quantum engineer what keeps them up at night, and they might not say “the physics”.
Controlling a single cat qubit‘s behavior has been our focus up to now.
What they might say instead is: manufacturing, integrating, cooling, interfacing, calibrating, and repeating this over and over again.
Making a hundred qubits behave consistently, chip after chip, cooldown after cooldown, that is the next frontier.
The challenge isn’t brilliance. It’s repeatability at a scale where a single speck of dust, a single misaligned bond wire, a single thousandth of a degree of temperature drift can invalidate months of work.
This facility will enable Alice & Bob to triple its chip capacity, producing more chips at a wildly better quality, time after time.
Reproducibility is the bridge between “this works in a lab” and “this works as a product”.
The environment is the product
There’s one insight from building this facility that changes the way we look at our product: at the millikelvin scale, the computer and its environment are one and the same. A truck driving past the building. The Earth’s own magnetic field. Any of these can corrupt a computation.
So the facility itself is, in a real sense, part of the quantum computer. The vibration-tested foundations, the mu-metal shielding, the system recycling air sixty times per minute. And let’s not forget all the components in a cryostat, from the first cable to the last screw, which must be non-magnetic.
This isn’t infrastructure supporting the hardware, it is the hardware, extended outward into the building.
That realization changes how you think about scaling quantum computing: we’re not just manufacturing chips, we’re manufacturing the conditions in which chips can perform as intended.
What “pre-industrial” really means
We describe this site as pre-industrial deliberately. We are not yet shipping quantum computers by the dozens to customers – today the number of quantum machines being sold at a European level is still very humbling. Such deals can take several years to come through, and the systems for now are crafted and installed one by one.
That being said, do stay tuned as the merry month of June might hold some announcements in store for Alice & Bob.
These systems, whilst built in-house for now, are all intended to live elsewhere. We will ship them to our customers and install them in other environments. That means they need to be sturdy and adaptive enough, and come with a clear enough set of rules on how to host them properly.
So in the meantime, what we are doing is learning, at scale, how to build these systems, so that when the time comes we know how to ship and install them at our customers’ sites.
The history of deep tech is littered with companies that cracked the science but stumbled at the manufacturing transition. We are trying to get ahead of that by building the transition infrastructure now.
The ability to test not just whether one qubit works, but whether we can make a hundred of them work, together .
This is what the shift from research to product actually looks like: a factory floor.
The Engineers
Quantum computing spent its first decades as a physics problem. The next decade belongs to the people who can translate physics into process, who think about cable lengths in terms of signal propagation time, who plan fabrication runs the way a semiconductor foundry plans production, who can hold in their heads simultaneously the requirements of a dilution refrigerator, a cleanroom, a signal chain, and a building.
We’ve been hiring those people : mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, building managers, and we need more help.
This is their place to work.
The question is no longer can we build a quantum computer? It is how do we build them at scale?
That is the question this facility was designed to answer.
If you want to help us answer that question – our positions, like this facility, are wide open.
Check our open roles and apply here.
