PsiQuantum Brand Guidelines: Photonic Qubits From Palo Alto, Built in Chicago and Queensland

Light as the qubit.

PsiQuantum is an American quantum computing company based in Palo Alto, California. It was founded in 2016 by four physicists — Jeremy O’Brien, Terry Rudolph, Pete Shadbolt and Mark Thompson — who had been professors or researchers at the University of Bristol and Imperial College London, according to English Wikipedia; the company’s own website lists all four as co-founders. The Australian technology site iTnews noted in April 2024 that two of the co-founders are Australians.

The company’s premise is set out on its website. After “more than a decade of academic research,” PsiQuantum says, it was founded on the idea that photonic qubits — quantum bits carried by particles of light — together with mature semiconductor manufacturing would give the fastest path to commercially useful, fault-tolerant quantum computers. In 2019 it announced a manufacturing partnership with GlobalFoundries, according to English Wikipedia, and its website describes GlobalFoundries’ Fab 8 in Malta, New York, as the plant that has made thousands of silicon photonic wafers to PsiQuantum’s designs. The Quantum Insider reported in May 2026 that GlobalFoundries said it was continuing that long-running partnership.

English Wikipedia says PsiQuantum researchers introduced an architecture called fusion-based quantum computing in early 2021, and that in 2025 the company announced Omega, a silicon photonics chipset, and launched Construct, a software platform for writing fault-tolerant quantum algorithms, which it opened to all developers in 2026.

Its leadership changed in 2026. Forbes Australia reported in May 2026 that Jeremy O’Brien stepped down as chief executive in February and became executive chairman, and that Victor Peng, formerly of AMD, was appointed interim chief executive. The company’s website now lists Peng as chief executive and O’Brien as co-founder and executive chairman, with Rudolph, Shadbolt and Thompson in technical roles.

From Daresbury to Moreton Bay.

PsiQuantum describes a spread of sites. Its website lists the Palo Alto headquarters, where it develops and tests chips; a facility in Milpitas, California, that it calls PsiFactory; a research centre at Daresbury in England; and the GlobalFoundries fab in New York. The Daresbury centre was officially opened in October 2023 at the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s laboratory there. The STFC Hartree Centre said at the time that it was PsiQuantum’s first research and development facility anywhere outside the US, backed by UK government funding, and announced a collaboration with the company on algorithms for fault-tolerant computing.

Two sites are meant to hold full machines. In Australia, the federal and Queensland governments announced a joint investment in the company in April 2024. iTnews reported on 30 April 2024 that PsiQuantum would set up regional headquarters in Australia and host its first computer at a site near Brisbane Airport, which the company aimed to have operating by the end of 2027. That plan moved. In May 2026 PsiQuantum said it would build instead at Moreton Bay Central, in the City of Moreton Bay, on the site of a former paper mill at Petrie. Forbes Australia reported the same month that building at the airport had required a development plan that had not yet been issued, and that the company would open a test and validation lab at Griffith University’s Nathan campus. PsiQuantum says it broke ground at Moreton Bay Central on 17 June 2026, with Australian federal and Queensland ministers present.

In the United States, PsiQuantum and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker announced on 25 July 2024 that the company would anchor the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park on the former US Steel South Works site on Chicago’s Southeast Side, building a Quantum Computer Operations Center there, according to the Chicago Quantum Exchange. English Wikipedia says the company broke ground on its Chicago site in 2025.

Government programmes have tested the approach. On 6 February 2025, DARPA said it had selected, and was in negotiations with, Microsoft and PsiQuantum for the final validation and co-design stage of its Underexplored Systems for Utility-Scale Quantum Computing programme, part of its Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, which aims to judge whether any approach can reach utility-scale operation by 2033. The Quantum Insider reported in May 2026 that PsiQuantum had signed a letter of intent with the US Department of Commerce for proposed incentives under the CHIPS and Science Act, aimed at components such as barium titanate optical switches, single-photon detectors and advanced packaging.

Quantum computing, by modality.

Quantum computing companies sell machines that few customers will ever see, so their pictures carry much of the explaining. The most familiar image is the dilution refrigerator: a tiered, gold-coloured structure of plates and cables that looks a little like a chandelier when its outer casings are removed. Rigetti’s website, for one, walks visitors through such a refrigerator, naming the gold-plated copper plates that separate its temperature stages.

Each hardware approach has its own pictures. Companies that trap ions or neutral atoms tend to show vacuum chambers, laser tables and optical benches, often lit so that the beams and windows glow; makers of superconducting and silicon devices show chip close-ups and wafers, frequently under blue or violet light. Photonic companies show the optical chips and fibres that carry their qubits. Alongside the hardware come people: physicists and engineers at racks of control electronics, oscilloscopes and laptops.

Because qubits themselves cannot be photographed in any ordinary sense, the sector also leans on abstraction. Renderings of glowing spheres, lattices, interference patterns and waves stand in for superposition and entanglement, and dark backgrounds with points of coloured light are common across websites, investor presentations and conference stands.

Those conferences are part of the visual record too. IEEE Quantum Week, whose 2026 edition its organisers set in Toronto, gathers researchers and engineers around technical papers and workshops, while Q2B, which lists 2026 meetings in Tokyo, Copenhagen and Chicago, presents itself as a place to connect quantum technology with business. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — who founded it, who owns it and where its machines are built — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A Greek letter at the front.

The name begins with psi, the Greek letter that physics uses for the quantum wave function, written into one word with “quantum.” The company’s site is psiquantum.com, where it publishes its news by region, including a separate Australian section for the Queensland project.

On its website the company groups its work by site: a foundry in New York, a factory in Milpitas, a cryogenic test centre in England and two large builds in Illinois and Queensland. The Queensland project has changed location once, and its end-2027 date is a company target.

For a design guide, PsiQuantum shows how a research company can make a manufacturing method — chips made in a commercial foundry — the centre of its identity. Compare Xanadu, another company building quantum computers with light, and Microsoft, which DARPA selected alongside PsiQuantum in February 2025. For this guide we use a night violet and a pale lilac with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep PsiQuantum’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.