PsiQuantum's million-qubit facility breaks ground, scientists say the scale is sufficient to crack Bitcoin encryption

Quantum computing company PsiQuantum has launched the construction of a million-qubit quantum computing facility in Chicago. PsiQuantum co-founder Peter Shadbolt shared photos from the construction site on the X platform on Thursday, stating that 500 tons of steel have been erected in six days.

The company previously announced in September that it had raised $1 billion to build the facility, in collaboration with chip manufacturer Nvidia, aiming to make quantum computing commercially viable to support the next generation of AI supercomputers. Scientists say that the computational power of a million qubits is equivalent to that of hundreds of billions of ordinary computers, enough to crack Bitcoin's encryption technology. Bitcoin developers are currently discussing whether to take immediate action against quantum threats through a hard fork.

A preprint scientific paper released last month suggests that breaking a 2048-bit key would require about 100,000 qubits, while Bitcoin encryption uses a 256-bit key. The largest quantum computer currently comes from the California Institute of Technology, 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.

Research by crypto asset management firm CoinShares in February of this year pointed out that only 10,230 Bitcoins are simultaneously vulnerable to quantum threats, with wallet addresses' encryption keys publicly visible, amounting to approximately $728 million at current market prices.