Quantum computing has spent years as a laboratory curiosity. An Australian company called Silicon Quantum Computing (SQC) is making the case, with commercial deployments to back it up, that the practical phase has already started.
Founded in 2017, SQC has raised approximately AU$180 million and employs more than 100 people — 85 of them engineers. It runs its own fabrication facility, designing and testing hundreds of chip variations each year with weekly firmware releases. What sets SQC apart from competitors is the physical approach: rather than superconducting circuits, the company places individual phosphorus atoms inside isotopically pure silicon with 0.13-nanometer precision to create qubits that minimize computational error. In December 2025, SQC published a 99.99% two-qubit gate fidelity result in Nature — a benchmark that matters for practical error correction at scale.
Two products are currently in commercial deployment:
- Watermelon — a quantum machine learning system, deployed for Telstra to cut machine learning training time and in a rack-mounted configuration for Australian Defence
- Quantum Twins — launched in February 2026, an application-specific quantum simulator that physically encodes replicas of molecules and materials for customers who need atomic-level chemical interaction modeling
Commercial outcomes have been reported across energy (load balancing and demand forecasting), telecommunications (network health assessment and outage prediction), finance (anti-money laundering analysis), and government security evaluation. The hardware layer relies on AMD: Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC chips handle qubit control and readout, while Ryzen Threadripper clusters support classical simulation and software preparation.
CEO Michelle Simmons has said that reaching commercial scale requires partnering with the most cutting-edge hardware manufacturers available. SQC's target for full commercial-scale quantum computers is 2033 — a long runway, but the company has an advantage that remains rare in the sector: actual production systems rather than just controlled laboratory demonstrations.
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