The company has drawn governments, a major chipmaker, and the Pentagon into an effort to control fragile photons and build a useful quantum machine. It aims to be the first. PsiQuantum aims to build a quantum computer that can solve some of science's hardest problems. Its chips, cut from wafers like the one shown here, will perform computations using photons, the particles of light. The machine that could change the world will be housed in a room that looks like a data center crossed with an ice cream factory. Inside will be some 100 stainless-steel cabinets, each about six feet tall and connected to a supply of liquid helium that keeps them only a few degrees above absolute zero. Inside those cabinets will be hundreds of chips, and on those, thousands of particles of light flying through a maze of optical switches and beam splitters.

Next-gen networking tech, sometimes powered by light instead of electricity, is emerging as a critical piece of AI infrastructure. The new era of Silicon Valley runs on networking--and not the kind you find on LinkedIn. As the tech industry funnels billions into AI data centers, chip makers both big and small are ramping up innovation around the technology that connects chips to other chips, and server racks to other server racks. Networking technology has been around since the dawn of the computer, critically connecting mainframes so they can share data. In the world of semiconductors, networking plays a part at almost every level of the stack--from the interconnect between transistors on the chip itself, to the external connections made between boxes or racks of chips.

Scientists and engineers are still toiling in labs in a race to develop quantum computers that would significantly outperform traditional computers. They're pouring record-high funding into work on computing power that is still considered years away from being ready. Investors have invested $1.02 billion into quantum computing companies so far this year. That's more than was funneled into the industry during the previous three years combined, according to PitchBook data. Quantum computers, which store data in any combination of zeros and ones simultaneously, have the potential to one day facilitate tremendous breakthroughs in anything that requires complex calculations in fields like biotech, chemistry and logistics.