On this episode of The Drill Down Insider, a Six Five Media production, host Cory Johnson is joined by Infleqtion‘s CEO Matthew Kinsella for a conversation on the intersecting trajectories of quantum computing technology and artificial intelligence.
Their discussion covers:
- The current state of quantum computing technology and its impact on AI development
- How Infleqtion’s unique approach to quantum computing is fueling innovation in AI applications
- The challenges and opportunities in integrating quantum computing with AI
- The future landscape of AI and quantum computing and what it means for businesses
- Insights into Infleqtion’s roadmap and future projects
Learn more at Infleqtion.
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Transcript:
Cory Johnson: Welcome to Drill Down Insider, where we drill down on the business stories behind the right companies at the right place at the right time. Hi, welcome to The Drill Down Insider, where we drill down on the business stories behind the right companies in the right place at the right time. Today with a look at Infleqtion, with CEO Matt Kinsella.
Matt Kinsella: Hi, Cory.
Cory Johnson: Matt Kinsella joins us right now. Matt, glad to have you from somewhere here in San Francisco, even though I’m on the other side of San Francisco at this very moment, in the Ferry Building. Talk to me, how do you describe what Infleqtion is?
Matt Kinsella: Infleqtion, at the highest level, I call us a quantum technologies company. I very distinctly use the word technology because many people, myself included, historically usually thought if you say the word quantum, the only word that follows is computing. We are a quantum technologies company that encompasses both the sensing aspects of the quantum world, as well as the computing aspects of the quantum world. We can get into what all that means. But to answer your question, we’re a quantum technologies company.
Cory Johnson: Yeah, I do want to get into that. When I look at quantum companies, so often what I’m looking at is a science project.
Matt Kinsella: Yes. Well, Infleqtion’s core mission is to commercialize quantum. Yes, many things historically in quantum, and many things today in quantum are still in that science or research phase. But we are moving from that science and research phase into the commercial phase. I view Infleqtion as the leader in doing that. While quantum computing isn’t here today yet, in a commercial way, other technologies in quantum are. Many of those technologies fall under that broader sensing bucket. Yes, quantum has its roots in quantum physics, which goes back to the early 20th Century. It is a very strange and bizarre science. But we can harness those-
Cory Johnson: Not really.
Matt Kinsella: No, not that weird. Einstein only called it spooky. But we can harness those things to make incredible products. Our mission is to commercialize that weird science.
Cory Johnson: Let’s talk about them because I do get the sense, as I read about your company and talk to your people, that this is not about can we do it, but what we’ll do with it.
Matt Kinsella: Yes, very much so. Again, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and this is why many people follow the word quantum with the word computing, is quantum computing. That, when we get there, will change many things that humanity is able to do. Quantum computers aren’t necessarily going to do things that regular computers can do but better. They’re going to do a lot of things that regular computers just cannot do. That said, they will be able to do some things that regular computers can do. But they’ll do them better, and in a more energy efficient manner.
But that is still, call it probably three years off, before we can do something that you or I would say, “Oh my gosh,” with quantum computing. There’s a certain threshold that we’ll need to hit, which is something like 100 logical qubits. Again, I know I’m using terms that in and of themselves need to be defined. But just say, quantum computing from a commercial perspective is still a few years away. Amazing market, we are actively pursuing that, but there isn’t a commercial market today because it can’t commercially do anything yet that a regular computer can’t do.
Now that is quite different than what exists in the sensing market. We’re utilizing some of that same weird science we talked about, we can make products that today can perform orders of magnitude better than the existing standards out there. Again, those are largely in what we call quantum sensing. The first product that we’re bringing to market, or have brought to market, is called Tiqker, which is a quantum optical clock, which can keep time orders of magnitude more accurately and precisely than anything else on the market. We do that by manipulating the quantum structure of rubidium atoms to turn some of the intricacies inside that atom into the ticking of a clock.
Cory Johnson: Tiqker with a question presumably. I picture someone at Infleqtion’s offices going around to keyboards, pulling out the Cs and replacing them with Qs. I love all your naming conventions that has things named with Qs.
Matt Kinsella: I said our mission is to commercial quantum. Our second mission is to find all of the phonetic sounds CK, and replace them with the letter Q, of course.
Cory Johnson: Yeah. I love it. Let’s talk about some of those uses. Start there with Tiqker, and talk about a clock.
Matt Kinsella: Yeah, absolutely.
Cory Johnson: Why is a more accurate clock better than an atomic clock better?
Matt Kinsella: Yes. Let’s even zoom out because-
Cory Johnson: Or, not why is it better. Why is it needed I guess is the question?
Matt Kinsella: Why is it needed? It’s needed for a number of different reasons. At the highest level, if you don’t think about it, which I haven’t spent a lot of my time throughout my life thinking about, you don’t realize just how important timekeeping is to everything we do. It enables trillions of dollars of economic value. If you think about everything. First of all, everything the military does is all based upon synchronization. They’re highly reliant upon the GPS system to do that. Put a pause on that, because we’ll talk more about that.
But if you just think about every financial transaction is stamped, from a time perspective. All of our GPS today is based upon time. The Global Navigation Satellite System is largely a time distribution system. The energy grid is synced by time. Then of course, data centers rely heavily on timekeeping to provision workloads. Time, in and of itself, is a very, very valuable thing. We can just provide a significantly more precise view of that time. Why does that matter?
Let’s use that military example. Today, heavily reliant upon the GPS system to synchronize all of their operations. GPS is a finicky system though, and increasingly it is able to be spoofed. In fact, spoofings have gone up considerable, especially in Europe since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, as well as in the Middle East with the conflict in Israel and the Gaza Strip. Thousands of percentage increase in GPS spoofing. That’s very scary because in a hot conflict, the person to decide who can actually navigate in the fog of war without accessing GPS would be the side that would have a significant advantage.
The military is trying to recreate all of the benefits of GPS, but locally. One of the ways in which to do that is to have highly, highly accurate clocks locally on all of your devices, as opposed to relying on the GPS system. That’s one example as to why it really matters. Another great example in the commercial realm is the data center world. Today, a lot of pressure is being put on data centers to actually be able to utilize all the infrastructure that they have because that is being worked very, very hard to train AI models. They’re looking for ways to eke more out of their existing infrastructure.
Cory Johnson: Nvidia, Jensen Huang talks about this. As soon as he opened his mouth, he talks about efficiency in data centers and using what they’ve got. And talks about quantum.
Matt Kinsella: It’s really one of the number one issues that are impacting the tech world today. Time is a very important part of that. There’s networking, there’s other aspects. But time is at the backbone of all of this because master clocks within the data centers provision workloads across all the various GPUs. If you can just have a much, much more fine-grain concept of time, you can eke more performance out of your data centers. That’s another really good example as to why you might need much, much more accurate time.
Cory Johnson: I think that really ties in with why AI and quantum are heading off to the same direction to make each other work better.
Matt Kinsella: Absolutely. There are a number of intersections between AI and quantum. One of them is as simple as quantum clocks can let you get more out of your AI infrastructure. That’s one very, very easy example. But there’s a number of different examples as well. It’s interesting to think about how quantum computing in AI are to intersect. GPUs continue to push the limits on what we thought classical computing could do. In some ways, GPUs have pushed out this concept of quantum advantage because existing, classical infrastructure with GPUs has started to do things that we didn’t think regular computers could do, and thought that might just only exist in the world of quantum. What we’re able to do is, using our quantum software which we wrote for quantum processing units, we can actually apply that to GPUs and have those GPUs start to think they’re QPUs in some ways. Based on our software, we can do some of the things that you thought you would need a quantum computer to do in the world of classical computing. I do believe our quantum software is a way in which we bridge the gap between classical computing and quantum computing. A lot of that is done utilizing GPUs.
Cory Johnson: What is Sqorpius? Spelled with a Q, of course.
Matt Kinsella: Sqorpius, spelled with a Q, is our quantum computer. We have named our quantum computing efforts Sqorpius. We have sold a Sqorpius unit … Well, we’ve sold a quantum computer to the United Kingdom, as well as to the Japanese government. Sqorpius, again, yes, is a phonetically Q’ed word that we use to call our quantum computer.
Cory Johnson: Do those efforts exist side-by-side with the deployment of quantum techniques, as you wait and develop a quantum computer?
Matt Kinsella: Very much so. The way I think, and I stole this concept from the Marvel cinematic universe, so apologies to Disney.
Cory Johnson: I’m up for it.
Matt Kinsella: I view quantum coming out into the world in a phased approach. Right now, we’re squarely in phase one, which is quantum sensing. Phase two will be quantum computing. But a lot of the components, as well as the software that you use to build the products in phase one of sensing are the exact same thing as you need to build quantum computers. Our strategy, how it’s always been, we are commercializing quantum. We’re selling products into the quantum sensing market. But as we do that, we’re getting better at all the things we need to do to build quantum computers when that commercial market does come at scale. As I mentioned, we have sold quantum computers today, but they are to nation-states funded basically for their researchers to get used to quantum computers. Again, they don’t yet do anything that you couldn’t do on a classical computer today.
Cory Johnson: It does sound though, that unlike the world of compute, which we’ve seen virtualization came after compute.
Matt Kinsella: Yes.
Cory Johnson: It seems like you’re getting a notion of virtualization ahead of compute, when it comes to quantum right now, because you’re able to do some things before the computers are there.
Matt Kinsella: In a sense, that’s right. Yes. I’d say this concept, it has been a bit of a pleasant surprise. The software that we developed specifically for quantum computers actually can do interesting things when used on classical hardware. I do view that as a bridge between the pre-quantum computing world and the post-quantum computing world. This is getting into the science a bit. The way we do everything, whether it’s quantum sensing or quantum computing, is we precisely control atoms with lasers. If you think, “Well, hey, what does a quantum clock have to do with a quantum computer?” The answer is a lot. I almost feel like I’m channeling my inner Steve Jobs from the first iPhone announcement where he said, “We’re building a touchscreen iPod, we’re building a phone, and we’re building an internet communicator. But they’re not three things, it’s one thing.”
In many ways, our clock and our computer aren’t that dissimilar. We are just precisely controlling atoms by using lasers, and we’re trapping them in vacuum cells. We might be using a different species of atom, we might be using a different frequency of laser, or we might be arraying the atoms in a different way. The better we get at doing that, the closer it brings in having a commercial fault-tolerant gate-based quantum computer. A lot of that underlying technology is the exact same for a clock as it would be for a computer.
Cory Johnson: It seems like it would be hard to be the CEO of a company like this. With so many possible directions you could go in, how do you even start to address what markets to get into and what the total addressable market size might be?
Matt Kinsella: Yes. Well, I will say that my history as an investor comes in handy here.
Cory Johnson: Yeah.
Matt Kinsella: Before joining as the CEO of Infleqtion in April, I was one of the first, actually the first investor in Infleqtion in 2018. We seeded the business. I had been at a firm called Maverick for 19 years. In many ways, your question is how do you allocate capital? I’ve taken a very investor-centric approach to this, and analyzed all the various projects we’re working on, and then allocating capital across those based upon their return on investment potential. Right now, it’s clear to me that the most near-term commercial opportunity for us is Tiqker, so we’re allocating capital behind that and making sure we can fulfill all the existing orders we have, as well as generate more orders. Then we’re allocating capital behind another sensing project, which is Quantum RF, which stands for Quantum Radio Frequency Antenna.
Then also, of course, the ROI on compute is very large, so it’s worth investing dollars behind that. I’ve focused our efforts on clocks, and then RF antennas, as well as compute. There are a couple of other areas that we are focused on internally, but we’re making sure those are funded with external dollars because there is that ability to get those external dollars through government programs.
Cory Johnson: Finally, is there a dollar amount on that TAM? Is that useful to put something on that?
Matt Kinsella: I’ve done my best, and our team internally has done our best to size the opportunities. I’d say clocks are in the tens of billions of dollars of opportunity.
Cory Johnson: Wow.
Matt Kinsella: Especially as we’re able to cost-down and size-down. Right now, I’d say our Tiqker is the size of three pizza boxes, so it’s a three-U rack-mounted device. In its current form factor, the opportunity is somewhere in the one to two billion dollar range. But as we drive that price down from where it is today, and I think we’ll be able to drive it down by about 90% over the next several years, all based upon integration of our photonics into chips, will take that down from three pizza boxes down to chip scale. Again, we can drive that price down by something like 90%. That will vastly expand the TAM, whereas you’ll see our small version of Tiqker devices in many, many things. Quantum computing, I’d say that all bets are off as to how large that opportunity is. But suffice to say, it’s in the hundreds of billions of dollars. But again, it’s one of those things where we don’t know all the things we’ll be able to do with a quantum computer quite yet. But it will change a lot of things. Chemistry is the first market that will be highly, highly enhanced by quantum computers.
Cory Johnson: Amazing stuff. Matthew Kinsella is the CEO of Infleqtion. Matthew, thank you for your time. Appreciate it.
Matt Kinsella: Thank you so much, Cory. It was great to be here.
Cory Johnson: All right. Coming up next on The Drill Down to Bite, the one number that tells us a whole lot more about Infleqtion, right after this.
Speaker: The Drill Down Insider is brought to you by The Futurum Group, where analysts, researchers, advisors, content creators, and marketing experts help business leaders anticipate and understand shifts in their industries and build strategies to leverage disruptive innovation. With deep analysis, Futurum Group’s extensive industry experience delivers reliable research and data, thought leadership, and actionable advice to help you with your strategy and go-to-market efforts. Futurum Group.
Cory Johnson: I promised you The Drill Down Bite, the one number that tells us a whole lot. That number is 1600, 1600. Because in February, Infleqtion announced that they were unveiling the world’s largest qubit array comprising 1600 qubits, focused on error corrected logical qubits for commercial use. They’re putting this stuff to work already. Cool stuff from Infleqtion. All right, thanks for listening to Drill Down Insider. I’m Cory Johnson. Subscribe to me here at YouTube or follow me at @corytv on X. On Instagram and TikTok at drilldownpod. Follow, like, dislike if you must, but subscribe and comment because we want to hear from you.
Author Information
Cory Johnson is the Futurum’s Chief Market Strategist and the host of the Drill Down podcast.
His peripatetic career has seen him in prominent roles as a hedge fund portfolio manager and investor, technology journalist and broadcaster. Fundamentally he’s an entrepreneur -- helping to start media companies such as TheStreet.com, the Industry Standard, Slam (the world’s best-selling basketball magazine) and Vibe. He was CNBC’s first Silicon Valley correspondent and later helped create the TV show Bloomberg West for Bloomberg TV and the radio show and podcast Bloomberg Advantage. He was a senior executive at the blockchain startup Ripple, a portfolio manager for Kingsford Capital and a principal at the Forensic Research Group.
Johnson is also an advisor to Braintrust, C3.ai, Prolly AI, Provenance Bio, Stringr and serves as a delegate to the Episcopal Diocese of California.
