Is It Too Early to Scale Quantum?

In the race between qubit modalities, there’s a new metric of desirability that investors seem to keep an eye on. It used to be qubit counts, then fidelities. The latest is scalability and CMOS compatibility that is pulling spin qubits messaging forward. But the scaling messaging is coming for everyone. And that turns out to be the thing more and more of the field is competing on: not whose qubit is best, but whose qubit can be built at scale.

An assumption through 2025 was that Intel Quantum had been wound down with everything else (since Intel was “dead”). On April 23, at ISIG’s Quantum Computing Infra Summit, in the talk “Process Design Kit based on Intel 18A Technology for Scaling Quantum Processors,” Intel put up a slide showing every quantum chip it has taped out since 2023 and the ones coming: two generations of 99-dot 2D arrays back from the fab, a 729-dot chip finishing up last manufacturing now, a 1,971-dot follow-on taping out (”starting manufacturing”) this year, and a 10,…