A former Australian of the Year is establishing what she calls a world-first atomic-scale chip plant in Sydney in a bid to make her company Australiaโs answer to OpenAI.
Michelle Simmons, founder and chief executive of Silicon Quantum Computing, was asked at the John Monash Foundation oration on Thursday evening whether Australia could produce a quantum equivalent of OpenAI or Anthropic. โYes, it will be us,โ she said.
โWe are establishing an atomic-scale manufacturing plant in Sydney. Itโs the first one in the world,โ she told the audience at the Commonwealth Bankโs Sydney offices.
An SQC spokesman said the company was expanding its manufacturing with โa new facility to be announcedโ, but would not say where it would be, when it would open or what it would cost.
Ordinary computer chips store information as ones and zeros. Quantum computers store it in the quantum states of individual atoms or particles, which in theory lets them solve problems beyond any conventional machine, such as simulating molecules to design new drugs, batteries and materials. Those quantum states are fragile, and no company has yet built a quantum computer that can correct its own errors at a useful scale.
SQC makes its chips by placing individual phosphorus atoms in silicon, a technique Simmons and her team spent 25 years developing at UNSW.
The federal governmentโs $15 billion National Reconstruction Fund has put $60 million into SQC this year, alongside London venture firm Firgun Ventures and Tin Alley Ventures. The spokesman said that money had โplayed a key roleโ in the new facility.
The plant comes as SQCโs first product, a chip called Watermelon, starts to find buyers. Watermelon is not a full quantum computer. It works alongside conventional AI models to sharpen their predictions, and Simmons said tests with energy multinational Schneider Electric had improved the accuracy of next-day energy network forecasts by an average of 20 per cent.
She said Watermelon had five paying customers: Schneider, Telstra, the Commonwealth Bank, the Defence Department and a high-frequency trading firm that has not been announced.
CBA and Telstra are both early investors in SQC. A CBA spokesman described the bankโs use more cautiously, saying it had been experimenting with the chip โto see where the technology might be of benefitโ.
Simmons said demand was outstripping what SQC could make. โSince the announcements of both Telstra and Schneider, we have literally tens of customers trying to get in there,โ she said. โThe challenge weโve got now is how to make more of that product quickly so we can get it out into the hands of more customers.โ
She said SQC was standing by its target of a full, error-correcting quantum computer by 2033. The company has modelled its timeline on conventional computing, which took from the first transistor in 1947 to the arrival of personal computers in the early 1980s. SQC built its first single-atom transistor in 2012.
โThe error-corrected processor, the 2033, is the 1981 equivalent,โ Simmons said. โIโm standing by that because Iโm pretty confident on that, but Iโm hoping weโll get it sooner.โ
She said the new plant would make Sydney โthe home of atomic-scale manufacturingโ, and that much of its supply chain was already in Australia.
The oration is the annual dinner of the General Sir John Monash Foundation, which since 2001 has awarded $41.1 million in scholarships to 300 Australians to study at leading overseas universities.
Hugo Rourke, a former scholar who studied at Harvard on a CBA-funded scholarship and is now chief financial officer of health company Navigator Group, said the government too often compared Australia with countries such as France and Britain, when the real competition for founders was the US.
โItโs pretty clear that most founders in Australia go to the US,โ he said. โIf France is our competitor for talent, then weโre not shaping up the way we need to.โ
Rourke said Sydney property prices were part of the problem. โIf you leave university today and you want to buy a house in Sydney, it is incredibly attractive to go and stick in a professional services firm and make money as fast as possible,โ he said.
Simmons said talent was also flowing the other way, with about 70 per cent of SQCโs staff coming from overseas, increasingly from the US. โAustralia is a great place to be to build companies,โ she said.
David Swan moderated a fireside chat at the event, which was hosted by the Commonwealth Bank, an investor in Silicon Quantum Computing.
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David Swan is the technology editor for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously technology editor for The Australian newspaper.Connect via X or email.
