PsiQuantum's Million-Qubit Facility Breaks Ground, Scientists Say Scale Sufficient to Crack Bitcoin Encryption

Odaily News Quantum computing company PsiQuantum has commenced construction of a million-qubit quantum computing facility in Chicago. PsiQuantum co-founder Peter Shadbolt shared photos of the construction site on platform X on Thursday, stating that 500 tons of steel had been erected in six days. The company previously announced in September that it had raised $1 billion to build the facility, partnering with chip manufacturer Nvidia, with the goal of making quantum computing commercially viable to support next-generation AI supercomputers.

Scientists say that the computational power of a million qubits is equivalent to hundreds of billions of ordinary computers, sufficient to crack Bitcoin's encryption. Bitcoin developers are currently discussing whether to take immediate action through a hard fork to address the quantum threat. A preprint scientific paper published last month suggested that cracking a 2048-bit key would require about 100,000 qubits, while Bitcoin encryption uses a 256-bit key. Currently, the largest quantum computer comes from Caltech, with a scale of 6,100 qubits.

PsiQuantum co-founder Terry Rudolph stated in July that the company has no plans to use quantum computers to derive private keys from public keys. Research from crypto asset management firm CoinShares in February this year pointed out that only 10,230 Bitcoins are both quantum-vulnerable and have their wallet addresses' encryption keys publicly visible, which amounts to approximately $728 million at current market prices.