PsiQuantum's million-qubit facility begins construction, scientists say this scale is sufficient to crack Bitcoin encryption

Odaily Planet Daily reports that quantum computing company PsiQuantum has begun construction of a million-qubit quantum computing facility in Chicago. PsiQuantum co-founder Peter Shadbolt shared photos of the construction site on X platform on Thursday, stating that 500 tons of steel have been assembled in six days. The company previously announced in September that it raised $1 billion to build the facility, in partnership with chip manufacturer Nvidia, aiming to make quantum computing commercially practical to support the next generation of AI supercomputers.

Scientists say that a million-qubit computer has the computing power equivalent to hundreds of billions of ordinary computers, enough to crack Bitcoin’s encryption technology. Bitcoin developers are currently discussing whether to take immediate measures through a hard fork to address the quantum threat. A preprint scientific paper released last month estimates that cracking a 2048-bit key requires about 100,000 qubits, while Bitcoin encryption uses a 256-bit key. The largest quantum computer to date is 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. A study by crypto asset management firm CoinShares in February this year pointed out that only 10,230 Bitcoin are simultaneously vulnerable to quantum attacks, with their wallet addresses’ encryption keys publicly visible, valued at approximately $728 million at current market prices.