Quantum Motion, a London startup, has delivered what it calls the industry’s first full-stack quantum computer fabricated with the same 300-millimeter silicon CMOS processes used for smartphones and GPUs. Currently installed at the UK’s National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC), the system packages a silicon spin-qubit processor, control electronics, and developer tooling in a form factor that fits into three standard 19-inch racks, including the dilution refrigerator.
Company leaders tout the debut as a turning point. This is “quantum computing’s silicon moment,” said CEO James Palles-Dimmock, arguing that mass-manufacturable process technology is the surest route to scale.
The pitch: if qubits can be produced on ordinary foundry lines and managed by cryoelectronics (the study of superconductivity under super cold conditions) that live near the qubits at millikelvin temperatures (extreme cold, representing one-thousandth of a Kelvin), then systems can expand from today’s prototypes to fault-tolerant machines without the exotic manufacturing that quantum usually requires.
A Pragmatic Focus
The stack comes with practical concessions to developers and data-center managers. The control and software layers are compatible with the Python frameworks Qiskit and Cirq, reducing integration friction, and the auxiliary gear is designed to sit outside the three-rack footprint so facilities can upgrade quantum processing units (QPUs) without re-architecting the room. NQCC director Michael Cuthbert called the installation an important step in the center’s testbeds program, noting his team will now begin validation and application mapping to the silicon architecture.
Under the hood, Quantum Motion uses a tile-based QPU that integrates compute, readout, and control into a dense, repeatable array. In theory, that modularity allows future generations to scale to an astounding millions of qubits per chip. The company also highlights machine-learning-driven tuning to automate calibration—a true challenge as qubit counts rise.
Still Need Verification
Still, there’s a gap between promise and reality. Quantum Motion has not disclosed qubit counts, gate fidelities, coherence times, or early benchmarks. There’s also no public detail on error mitigation, connectivity, or how the architecture will confront the overhead of error correction at scale.
Those omissions don’t negate the engineering feat of fitting a dilution refrigerator and control stack into a data-center-friendly footprint. But until the NQCC’s testing yields independent results, the system remains an impressive claim in search of published performance.
The silicon strategy is logical, in fact inevitable. CMOS supply chains are mature, tooling is well understood, and unit economics improve with volume. If the system’s qubits can be replicated with foundry-class uniformity and wired up with integrated cryo-control, the industry gets a path that looks far more like classic semiconductor scaling than lab-built one-offs.
The appeal for IT buyers: a quantum box that rolls into a row of racks and speaks the same dev frameworks as the rest of the stack.
Quantum Motion, a 2017 spin-out of University College London and Oxford, has ambitions beyond this installation. It recently secured SiQEC, a UK project focused on silicon quantum error correction, and is participating in DARPA’s quantum benchmarking initiative. Hugo Saleh, the company’s president and CCO, said the goal is commercially useful systems this decade, pitched as a customer- and developer-first approach that leverages the same silicon ecosystem powering mobile and AI.
