PsiQuantum's Bet: Skip the Lab, Build the Factory — CHIPS Money and a GlobalFoundries Line Back the Photonic Path
While most quantum companies race to add qubits to lab systems, PsiQuantum has spent a decade on a contrarian premise: a useful quantum computer is a manufacturing problem first and a physics problem second. That thesis now has federal backing. In May, the company signed a letter of intent with the U.S. Department of Commerce for $100 million in proposed CHIPS Act incentives to accelerate domestic production of quantum components, The Quantum Insider reported.
The money targets unglamorous but decisive hardware. Combined with company co-investment, the incentives would fund U.S. manufacturing of barium titanate optical switches, high-temperature single-photon detectors and the advanced packaging needed for utility-scale fault-tolerant systems, per The Quantum Insider. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the investment 'will build on our domestic industry, creating thousands of high-paying American jobs while advancing American quantum capabilities.'
PsiQuantum's core asset is its Omega chipset, a silicon photonic design manufactured with GlobalFoundries at the foundry's New York facility — a partnership dating to 2019, according to Quantum Zeitgeist. Because the chips use integrated optical waveguides and modulators on standard silicon processes, the company argues it can scale by leaning on the same industrial base that makes conventional semiconductors, rather than hand-building exotic hardware one system at a time.
The supply-chain footprint backs the rhetoric. The Quantum Insider reported that PsiQuantum spent roughly $200 million with American suppliers across 38 states in 2025, alongside a partnership with the Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome, New York, that has run since 2022. The company also broke ground on what has been described as America's largest quantum computing infrastructure project, at the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park in Chicago, with a second flagship site under way in Brisbane, Australia.
Leadership has been retooled for the industrial phase. In February, the company named Victor Peng — the former Xilinx CEO and AMD president — interim chief executive, with co-founder Jeremy O'Brien moving to executive chairman, per Quantum Zeitgeist. Installing a semiconductor operator atop a quantum startup is a statement of intent: the next milestones are about yield, packaging and construction schedules as much as fidelity records.
The war chest matches the ambition. PsiQuantum closed a $1 billion Series E in 2025 — at a $6 billion pre-money valuation, according to Crowdfund Insider — making it one of the best-capitalized private companies in the sector. It also advanced to the final stage of DARPA's Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, the Pentagon program stress-testing claims that utility-scale systems can be built by 2033, per Quantum Zeitgeist.
For public-market investors in small-cap quantum stocks, PsiQuantum is the private giant that frames the competitive question: if photonics-plus-foundries works, the winning cost curve may belong to whoever industrializes first, not whoever demonstrates the next qubit-count record. The company's cryogenic photonic approach still must prove itself at system scale — but with federal incentives, a foundry partner and a chip-industry CEO, it has assembled the pieces to find out.
