Speaking at the John Monash Foundation oration at Commonwealth Bank's Sydney offices on Thursday evening, Simmons, a former Australian of the Year, was asked whether Australia could produce a quantum equivalent of OpenAI or Anthropic. "Yes, it will be us," she said. "We are establishing an atomic-scale manufacturing plant in Sydney. It's the first one in the world."
An SQC spokesman said the company was expanding its manufacturing with "a new facility to be announced", but would not say where it would be, when it would open or what it would cost.
SQC makes its chips by placing individual phosphorus atoms in silicon, a technique Simmons and her team spent 25 years developing at UNSW. Ordinary computer chips store information as ones and zeros, while quantum computers store it in the quantum states of individual atoms or particles. That in theory lets them solve problems beyond any conventional machine, such as simulating molecules to design new drugs, batteries and materials. Those quantum states are fragile, however, and no company has yet built a quantum computer that can correct its own errors at a useful scale.