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Quantum computing: Qubits are the new space race
A quantum computer is dramatically different from the computers we have – our laptops, desktops and smartphones.
Wiping our shoes, we enter a sparkling glass-walled room with vibration-absorbent floors and separate dedicated earthing. A cylinder hangs in the middle with gold-plated copper layers sitting inside a dilution refrigerator. Wires, cables, monitors and pipes emerge in and out of the cylinder like an organised Hydra. Some pipes go into two other rooms – one houses the compressed helium, the other one the invertor. The cables go into racks that further feed into computers . A loud cling-cling sound of the pulse tube overwhelms the glassed-in room, making talking difficult.
All of this infrastructure, as well as the 150 people team of startup QPiAI revolve around one 6cm-sized, 64-qubit quantum processing chip that this cylinder houses. It’s the heart of India’s first full-stack quantum computer, Indus, which at 25-qubit processing power, is the most powerful in the country. Wrapped around this cylinder are all our hopes to be part of the quantum race.
A new beginning in compute
A quantum computer is dramatically different from the computers we have – our laptops, desktops and smartphones. Unlike classical computers that use mechanics and electric switches to process information, quantum computers use quantum mechanics and the physics of very small subatomic particles to perform calculations at a much faster scale. Last month, Google, one of the pioneers in quantum computers, released research that proved that a quantum processor is 13,000 times faster than even the fastest classical supercomputer. Google’s Willow, released last year, performed a computation in under five minutes that would take the fastest supercomputers we have today, 10 septillion years to solve.
No wonder everyone wants to develop this technology. The US, China and the EU have put in $1 billion each to develop indigenous versions of this technology. India’s National Quantum Mission, which started in 2023 with a budget of $720 million, is pushing to develop this ecosystem in academia and in startups.
Protecting the delicate state of the chip
What makes is very difficult to develop this technology is the quantum chip. It is delicate and needs to be protected from all external interference to work. It’s sensitive to vibration so it needs isolator dampers and a location with minimal disturbance. It needs its own power and separate dedicated earthing. It needs colder-than-space temperatures to reach a stable enough working condition, highlighting the emergence of cryogenics as an important field. At 7.3 milliKalvin, the chip inside Indus is so cold that, an engineer tells me, if you assume the chip is at room temperature, we would be sitting inside the sun. This is the reason that the computer’s components — the dilution refrigerator, the helium gas storage, the filtration and cooling methods — are spread across three large rooms in the QPiAI facility in North Bengaluru.
It’s this sensitive nature of the quantum chip that took Nagendra Nagaraja, CEO and founder of QPiAI three years (2021-2024) to find the right place to assemble the machine with parts sourced from Europe and elsewhere. After a lot of tech parks said no, it was Karle Towers in Hebbal that offered 128kwatt of dedicated power and a first floor to control vibration. “Even a lift attached to the building, located 60 metres away caused enough vibration to disturb the quantum state,” says Nagaraja, a lean, energetic 46-year old with a leather jacket casually flung on the back of his chair. (The leather jacket, an ode to Nvidia’s cofounder and his ex-boss Jenson Huang, is now a fashion statement for the bad boys of deep tech, but that’s another story for another day.)
To control the disturbance, the team put in separate grounding, isolator dampers, rubber flooring and state-of-the-art cryogenics. It took them almost a year to get the computer in a stable enough state that they could start experimentation – which was earlier in 2025. Once they had the working prototype, they raised $32 million from Avataar Ventures and the government’s Quantum Computer Mission. “For us, the government’s investment was a dream. The money came quicker than any VC,” Nagaraja says.
Money in hand, they’re busy expanding. QPiAI already has a swanky new second office, on the ground floor, with enough space to build six more quantum computers (three of 25-qubit power and three 8-qubit ones). The new office will also have a foundry so the team can build components needed for these computers indigenously, reducing the procurement hassle in future. Most importantly, the team is also developing more of their indigenous 64-qubit chips and working on 3D stacking of these wafers so they can get more processing power in future quantum computers.
To survive through the last few years before quantum became a buzz word, the startup exploited everything it could offer for revenue – products, solutions, certification. They have integrated quantum computing with AI to build algorithms for their six clients across manufacturing, finance, pharma and materials. “The next revenue will be from the quantum computers we’re building,” says Nagaraja.
With the hands-on experience, Nagaraja’s team today can install quantum computers for clients across the world and rent out the computer on machines the startup owns. This expertise-for-hire for building quantum hardware is something very few can boast of in the country. Perhaps that’s the reason QPiAI team will play an important role in the recently announced Karnataka government’s Quantum Supremacy Centre (QSC), one of the largest centres of quantum which will house facilities for chip fabrication, cryogenic testing, quantum cloud clusters and hardware at a cost of ₹1,136 crore. Nagaraja has been allotted 10 acres of land to build and install more quantum computers. “We want to put in 100 machines of 1,000 qubit each in this data centre, all indigenously manufactured in Bengaluru in the next three years,” he says. To realise this ambition, he will have to raise $200 million dollars in the next year or two. Once the capital expenditure is taken care of, he believes, they will need only half a million dollars annually to break even in two more years. “We can get that much Quantum as a service (QaaS) in a few years as unlike the West our operating expenses won’t be that high,” he says.
Quantum is built on ambition and fear
Nagaraja isn’t from a legacy institution like an IIT, but he makes up for it with a doer-mentality, an inventor mindset and a strong determination to build and succeed. Till now, he has accumulated over 40 patents and is currently the co-founder of three other deep-tech startups in Bangalore — two of them located right besides QPiAI. His team of 150 employees have 25 PhDs and an average age of 27.
There’s a go-getter energy in the office, in the physicist I meet, in the cryogenics expert I speak to. Most other quantum startups in India have focused on building specific parts of quantum hardware or software. QPiAI seems to be one of the few whose ambition go full stack in building indigenous hardware and software.
Globally, the technology is advancing rapidly. IBM has processors with more than 1,000 qubits. The California Institute of Tech (CalTech) announced a 6,100-qubit processor in September. Depending on who you speak to, we’re still 10-20 years away from seeing real-world applications of quantum computers. You can’t code or do AI applications on quantum cloud yet. There are actual, complicated physics problems that need to be solved before these computers have any real-world use – and physics moves at its own pace.
But thanks to a real fear, the race to build these computers has become relentless. Whoever builds the first working quantum computer will have the keys to the digital world. One of the important reasons that we need to build indigenous technology in quantum is that the first such working computer can potentially break all of the world’s current cryptography, encryption and security protocols. That’s anything from your personal email to our country’s nuclear codes. In a few seconds.
Nagaraja sees this danger as a massive opportunity. “Quantum computers are theoretically way more secure, but in the interim when these computers come into the real world, we will need to upgrade our systems to a new internet that’s quantum-enabled,” he says. It’s this opportunity or fear that QPiAI is currently riding as everyone from big tech companies to governments invest in this technology. “This will create a lot of more jobs in the future.”
(Shweta Taneja is an author and journalist who writes on deep tech, AI and science)
