Diraq, Quantum Computing Built in Standard Silicon

Diraq builds qubits the way the world builds chips. The Australian company makes them in silicon, on the same lines that turn out ordinary computer processors. It spun out of UNSW Sydney and is run by its founder, Andrew Dzurak, whose group worked on silicon qubits for two decades before the business existed. The bet is simple. If you can make a qubit on a standard production line, you can make millions of them, and millions is what a working error-corrected machine will need. That argument has drawn venture money, a United States CHIPS Act letter of intent and a place in a US defence benchmarking programme. Key takeaways 1. Silicon spin qubits in CMOS. Diraq stores quantum information in the spin of an electron, held inside a modified silicon transistor. The point is reuse. The same lines that make ordinary chips can make these. 2. UNSW Sydney spin-out. The company was founded by Scientia Professor Andrew Dzurak, who remains chief executive and founder. The underlying research program at UNSW ran for around two decades before the business launched. 3. Foundry-made qubits that hit fidelity targets. Working with imec on a 300mm line, Diraq reported unit cells with single- and two-qubit fidelities above 99 percent. Readout reached 99.9 percent. The result appeared in Nature in September 2025. 4. Hot qubits above 1 kelvin. Dzurak’s group demonstrated high-fidelity operation above 1 kelvin, far warmer than the millikelvin range of superconducting machines. Warmer operation could let control electronics sit closer to the qubits and lower cooling costs. 5. Government and venture backing. Diraq last put the total behind its technology at over 135 million US dollars, in February 2024. That figure, on the company’s own wording, already folds in Australian and American government research money. It has also signed a CHIPS Act letter of intent worth up to 38 million. 6. On DARPA’s benchmarking track. Diraq advanced to Stage B of DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative in November 2025. It sits among eleven companies still in contention, alongside IBM, IonQ, and Quantinuum. What Diraq does The manufacturability bet Diraq builds its processors around silicon spin qubits. The information sits in the spin of a single electron, held inside a tiny structure called a quantum dot. Those dots are formed in modified silicon transistors, the same device that fills every conventional microchip. The pitch follows from that. If the qubits are built from transistor structures, they can be made on the industrial lines that already turn out classical electronics. Andrew Dzurak, the founder and chief executive, puts the case in one line. “Silicon-based processors are the most economical and scalable approach to utility-scale quantum computing,” he said when the company signed its CHIPS Act letter of intent in May 2026. That choice frames the whole strategy. Most quantum hardware today, superconducting and trapped-ion machines included, needs specialised fabrication or assembly that is hard to scale to very large device counts. Diraq argues the hardest problem is not making a few good qubits. It is making millions of them reliably, and the semiconductor industry solved high-volume, high-yield manufacturing for transistors long ago. Its own pages put the goal as millions of qubits on a single chip. Why silicon spin qubits Size is the second argument. A silicon spin qubit is tens of nanometres across, against the millimetre-scale circuits of a superconducting machine. That matters, because a useful fault-tolerant computer may need to pack enormous numbers of physical qubits into a manageable footprint. Diraq treats density and foundry compatibility as its core advantages. This is not a research device for its own sake. The company positions silicon spin qubits as the technology most likely to reach commercial scale, and backs the claim with peer-reviewed results showing that foundry-made qubits can match hand-built laboratory ones. For readers comparing modalities, Diraq is one of eight vendors profiled in the Quantum Zeitgeist guide to the top silicon spin quantum computing companies. From UNSW research to a company Two decades of silicon qubit work at UNSW Diraq grew out of research at UNSW Sydney. Andrew Dzurak is a Scientia Professor in quantum engineering there, and his work on silicon-based qubits stretches back roughly two decades, well before the company existed. That lineage is why Diraq can point to a deep patent portfolio. The business was created to commercialise it, not to start the science over. Dzurak founded Diraq in 2022 to take the UNSW technology to market, and he is chief executive as well as founder. Keep the two apart when reading the record. The research history is two decades older than the company. Headquarters and US presence The company is rooted in Sydney, with research tied to the UNSW campus, and it names Australia as a primary location. It has built a United States presence as it has grown, chasing federal partnerships and capital. Public sources put its US base in Palo Alto. The board reflects that footing. It is chaired by William Jeffrey, a former director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, who framed the company’s American funding in national terms. “Quantum technology is a matter of national competitiveness,” he said in May 2026. Australian research roots and American institutional ties have shaped how the company raises money, including its work under the US CHIPS framework described in the Quantum Zeitgeist report on the CHIPS Act award to scale Diraq silicon quantum processors. The silicon spin-qubit technology Modified transistors and 300mm wafers The qubits are gate-defined quantum dots, formed in silicon metal-oxide-semiconductor structures. Those are modified versions of the transistors in everyday chips. Devices are made on a 300mm wafer process, the standard large-wafer format of modern foundries, which is central to the claim that the technology can be mass produced. Research and demonstration devices have come off imec’s 300mm spin-qubit platform in Belgium. For production it has named GlobalFoundries and its 22FDX process, aiming to put qubits and conventional control transistors on one chip. Gregg Bartlett, chief technology officer at GlobalFoundries, said the firm was “proud to partner with Diraq to advance silicon-based quantum processors, leveraging our cryo-CMOS quantum capabilities”. The two partners do different jobs. Every high-fidelity result so far was fabricated at imec, and GlobalFoundries is the stated route to integrating qubits with control logic at production scale. Hot qubits and fidelity One result from Dzurak’s group stands out. A 2024 paper in Nature reported silicon spin qubits operating above 1 kelvin, where most quantum processors need the millikelvin range. The work gave single-qubit Clifford fidelity up to 99.85 percent and a two-qubit gate at 98.92 percent at that temperature. Diraq frames warmer operation as the path to putting control electronics next to the qubits. The manufacturing numbers have climbed since. In June 2024 Diraq reported 99.9 percent single-qubit control fidelity on an imec 300mm device, which it called the highest such figure for a silicon spin qubit made in a foundry, as covered in the Quantum Zeitgeist piece on Diraq’s 99.9 percent qubit control accuracy. A September 2025 Nature paper followed with industry-compatible unit cells across multiple devices. Single- and two-qubit fidelities came in above 99 percent, with readout up to 99.9 percent. Those are the error rates needed to make quantum error correction viable. Diraq’s silicon spin-qubit hardware, a patterned wafer, the interior of a dilution refrigerator and cleanroom wafer handling of the kind its partner foundries carry out. Images courtesy of Diraq. Fidelity records and benchmarking Fidelity records Diraq’s technical track record rests on a sequence of peer-reviewed results rather than press claims alone. The 2024 hot-qubit work in Nature established high-fidelity single-qubit operation above 1 kelvin, though its two-qubit gate sat at 98.92 percent rather than above 99. A separate 2024 Nature Physics paper led by Tuomo Tanttu reported above-99 percent two-qubit gate fidelity, which Diraq describes as the first silicon-CMOS platform to reach that level.

The Quantum Zeitgeist coverage of Diraq’s 99 percent two-qubit gate fidelity details how the team combined gate recalibration, materials choices, and pulse engineering. The single-qubit control figure of 99.9 percent, reported in June 2024 on an imec 300mm device, is the other anchor result. Keeping these straight matters, because the 99.9 percent number is a single-qubit control fidelity and the separate 99 percent figure is a two-qubit gate fidelity, and the two should not be merged into one claim. Both were achieved on devices made with industrial foundry processes rather than bespoke laboratory fabrication. Manufacturing and benchmarking In September 2025 Diraq and imec published a Nature result demonstrating several nominally identical two-qubit unit cells on a single 300mm wafer, all exceeding 99 percent gate fidelity, with state preparation and measurement fidelities reaching up to 99.9 percent. In July 2026 the group followed it with an eight-qubit result in Nature Communications, operating eight qubits on a 300mm foundry-fabricated SiMOS device. That paper reports coherence times of about 41 microseconds for Ramsey dephasing and about 1.31 milliseconds under Hahn echo, and it quotes no gate-fidelity percentage at all, so the earlier above-99 percent figures should not be attached to it. The companies framed this as evidence that industrially manufactured devices can perform as well as carefully hand-built research devices, a point explored in the Quantum Zeitgeist article on the path to utility scale for Diraq’s quantum chips. The demonstrations are device-level results on 300mm wafers rather than a complete wafer-scale processor. On the program side, Diraq advanced to Stage B of DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative in a selection announced in November 2025. DARPA describes Stage B as a phase for developing detailed research and development plans and identifying risk-reduction prototypes, following an initial Stage A concept assessment. Diraq is one of eleven companies on the Stage B list, a group that also includes IBM, IonQ, Quantinuum, QuEra, and fellow silicon firms Quantum Motion and Silicon Quantum Computing. Funding and government backing Venture rounds Diraq has raised capital across several rounds since it was founded, drawing on Australian and international investors. Its Series A totalled 20 million US dollars and was led by the technology investor Allectus Capital. A Series A-2 then closed at 15 million US dollars in February 2024 and was expanded in June 2024 to a total of 22 million with Quantonation leading, so the widely quoted 22 million figure is the enlarged round rather than a fresh raise. That round also included Main Sequence, Taronga Ventures, Uniseed, UniSuper, Co:Act Capital, and UNSW Sydney, as reported in the Quantum Zeitgeist piece on Diraq securing 22 million dollars for quantum computing. In July 2025 Diraq announced a further 15 million dollars, with new investors ICM Global Funds and Morgan Creek Digital joining returning backers including Main Sequence, Uniseed, NewSouth Innovations, and Quantonation. On 3 February 2026 Australia’s National Reconstruction Fund Corporation took a strategic equity stake of 20 million Australian dollars, about 14 million US. That is a government investment rather than a venture round. Diraq last stated a total for its technology in February 2024, putting it at over 135 million US dollars. Its wording was explicit that the figure folds in Australian and United States government research programmes rather than counting venture capital alone. It has not restated the figure since, and the July 2025 round, the NRFC stake and the CHIPS letter of intent all came after it. The CHIPS Act letter of intent On 21 May 2026 Diraq signed a letter of intent with the US Department of Commerce covering up to 38 million dollars in proposed federal funding from the CHIPS Research and Development Office. Rigetti and Quantinuum disclosed letters of intent of up to 100 million dollars each on the same day, and the filings behind those two state that the department receives an equity stake in return. The award is a planned commitment rather than disbursed cash, so the headline figure represents an intended ceiling. The stated purpose is to develop and scale quantum logic units and to accelerate manufacturing and integration capabilities for silicon spin quantum computing, including designs for large-scale and reliable qubit arrays. That language ties the funding directly to Diraq’s core thesis of producing qubits at industrial scale.

The National Reconstruction Fund stake described above added a domestic government holding alongside that international support. The roadmap to millions of qubits Stated targets Diraq publishes a phased roadmap that tracks rising qubit counts against time. The company’s own technology page lays out a first phase covering roughly 2022 to 2025 at the ten-qubit level, a second phase from 2025 to 2029 aimed at more than a thousand qubits, and a third phase from 2029 onward targeting more than a million. The 2029 marker is where that third phase begins rather than when the million-qubit machine arrives, and Diraq’s own technology page puts millions of qubits at 2031 and tens of millions at 2033. That structure reflects the company’s view that progress should be measured by manufacturable scale rather than by one-off device records. Company leadership has framed a first product around 2029 as an integrated module carrying thousands of physical qubits. The exact phrasing on Diraq’s own pages emphasises the 1,000-plus qubits band for the 2025 to 2029 window, so the 2029 product is best described in those terms rather than with a single fixed number. The near-term work therefore centres on turning demonstrated unit cells into integrated, repeatable modules. The long-term ambition Beyond the first product, Diraq describes a far larger goal. Its roadmap charts a course it states as millions of qubits by 2031 and tens of millions by 2033, with the ultimate target framed as the very large qubit counts needed for commercially useful, error-corrected computation. In partnership materials with imec, the language reaches toward the billions of qubits that a fully fault-tolerant machine might eventually demand. These are stated objectives rather than delivered results, and the gap between current device-level demonstrations and millions of integrated qubits remains enormous. What gives the targets credibility, in the company’s telling, is the manufacturing path itself, since semiconductor foundries have repeatedly scaled transistor counts by orders of magnitude. Whether that analogy holds for qubits, which are far more fragile than transistors, is the central open question for the whole silicon spin field. Where Diraq fits in the silicon field The silicon spin field Diraq is one of several companies betting that silicon will provide the manufacturing route to large-scale quantum computers. In the United Kingdom, DARPA lists Quantum Motion as a London company working on MOS-based silicon spin qubits, and it delivered a full-stack silicon system to the UK National Quantum Computing Centre in 2025, while Dublin-based Equal1 integrates qubits and control electronics on a single cryo-CMOS chip in rack-mounted systems. Intel, the rival on the same route Intel is the company Diraq most resembles, and the one with the most silicon behind it. It runs silicon spin qubits on its own 300mm CMOS lines at the D1 fab in Hillsboro, Oregon. In June 2023 it released Tunnel Falls, a twelve-qubit spin-qubit chip, to outside researchers. The first recipients were the Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the University of Maryland, Sandia National Laboratories, the University of Rochester and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Intel put the yield across the wafer at 95 per cent. Both companies have since claimed the same number. Intel’s May 2024 paper in Nature, titled Probing single electrons across 300-mm spin qubit wafers, reported 99.9 per cent gate fidelity and described it as the highest reported for qubits made with all-CMOS-industry manufacturing. Diraq reported 99.9 per cent single-qubit control fidelity on an imec 300mm device the following month, and called that the highest for a silicon spin qubit made in a foundry environment. The wording differs and so do the fabs, so the two figures are not obviously the same measurement. One commercial difference is plain. Intel owns the fab. Diraq buys capacity, using imec for research devices and naming GlobalFoundries for production, which keeps its capital cost down and leaves it dependent on partners for the line itself. A fourth Australian player, Silicon Quantum Computing, sits in the same national ecosystem but takes a different technical path. Led by Michelle Simmons, it places individual phosphorus atoms in silicon with atomic precision using scanning tunnelling microscopy, rather than forming gate-defined quantum dots in modified transistors. That distinction matters, because Diraq’s CMOS approach belongs to the same family as Intel, Quantum Motion, and Equal1, whereas the atomic-precision donor method is a separate manufacturing philosophy. Why CMOS is the differentiator What unites the CMOS camp, and what Diraq leans on hardest, is compatibility with the existing semiconductor industry. Silicon spin qubits are small, can be made in standard foundries, and in their hot-qubit form can operate above 1 kelvin rather than the millikelvin range of superconducting machines. Each of those properties points toward the same argument, that the path to enormous qubit counts runs through factories the world already operates. That thesis is not guaranteed to win. Superconducting machines from companies such as IBM currently lead on raw qubit count, and every modality faces the unsolved challenge of error correction at scale. Diraq’s distinctive position is to wager that manufacturability, more than any single fidelity record, will decide which technology reaches commercial scale, and to back that wager with peer-reviewed foundry results rather than projections alone. Founded2022, UNSW Sydney spin-out CEOAndrew Dzurak (founder and CEO) HeadquartersSydney, Australia, with US operations (reported Palo Alto, California) TechnologySilicon spin qubits in modified CMOS transistors, 300mm wafer process Funding raisedover 135 million dollars total on the company’s February 2024 figure, including government research programmes; about 57 million in disclosed venture rounds; CHIPS Act letter of intent up to 38 million NotableAbove-1-kelvin operation (Nature 2024); 99%+ fidelity foundry unit cells (Nature 2025); DARPA QBI Stage B Read next Top silicon spin quantum computing companiesDiraq’s CHIPS Act awardDiraq raises $22MWhat is quantum error correction Diraq FAQ What does Diraq make? Diraq develops quantum computing processors based on silicon spin qubits, which store quantum information in the spin of electrons held in modified silicon transistors. The company’s core idea is that these qubits can be produced using the same kind of manufacturing used for conventional computer chips. That focus on manufacturability sets it apart from many other quantum hardware approaches. Who founded Diraq and who runs it? Diraq was founded by Andrew Dzurak, a Scientia Professor in quantum engineering at UNSW Sydney, to commercialise technology developed over roughly two decades of research. He serves as chief executive and founder. The company spun out of UNSW and retains close ties to its research base. Where is Diraq based? Diraq is rooted in Sydney, Australia, with research operations connected to the UNSW campus. It has also built a presence in the United States as it has pursued American capital and government programs. Public sources describe a Palo Alto, California base for its US operations. What temperature do Diraq’s qubits operate at? A 2024 paper in Nature from Dzurak’s group demonstrated high-fidelity silicon spin-qubit operation above 1 kelvin. That is far warmer than the millikelvin range required by superconducting quantum computers. Warmer operation could allow control electronics to sit nearer the qubits and reduce cooling demands. What fidelity numbers has Diraq reported? Diraq reported 99.9 percent single-qubit control fidelity on an imec 300mm device in June 2024, and a separate above-99 percent two-qubit gate fidelity in a 2024 Nature Physics paper led by Tuomo Tanttu. A September 2025 Nature paper reported unit cells with single- and two-qubit fidelities above 99 percent, with state preparation and measurement reaching up to 99.9 percent. The single-qubit and two-qubit figures describe different operations and should not be merged, and none of them belong to the July 2026 eight-qubit paper, which quotes no fidelity percentage. How much funding has Diraq raised? Diraq last reported a total for its technology in February 2024, at over 135 million US dollars, combining venture capital with Australian and United States government research programmes. It has not restated it since. Disclosed equity rounds run to a 20 million dollar Series A led by Allectus Capital, a Series A-2 that closed at 15 million and was expanded to 22 million in June 2024 under Quantonation, and a further 15 million in July 2025. That is about 57 million dollars of venture money. Australia’s National Reconstruction Fund Corporation then took a stake of 20 million Australian dollars, about 14 million US, in February 2026. What is the CHIPS Act award Diraq received? On 21 May 2026 Diraq signed a letter of intent with the US Department of Commerce under the CHIPS and Science Act for up to 38 million dollars in proposed federal funding from the CHIPS Research and Development Office. Rigetti and Quantinuum disclosed their own letters of intent of up to 100 million dollars each on the same day. The funding is meant to scale manufacturing and integration of silicon spin quantum computing technology. How does Diraq compare with other silicon companies? Diraq shares its CMOS, gate-defined quantum-dot approach with Intel, the UK’s Quantum Motion, and Dublin-based Equal1, all of which rely on standard semiconductor foundries. Fellow Australian firm Silicon Quantum Computing takes a different path, placing phosphorus atoms in silicon with atomic precision. Diraq’s differentiator is its bet on manufacturability through existing chip-fabrication lines. Stay currentSee today’s quantum computing news on Quantum Zeitgeist for the latest breakthroughs in qubits, hardware, algorithms, and industry deals. Tags: