PsiQuantum has started building its million-qubit quantum facility. Scientists say a machine this po

PsiQuantum Breaks Ground on Million-Qubit Facility—Enough Power to Break Bitcoin's Code

Quantum computing just took a massive step forward—and Bitcoin's cryptography might want to pay attention. PsiQuantum, a company betting big on quantum, has started building a million-qubit facility in Chicago. Co-founder Peter Shadbolt posted pics from the site on X, showing 500 tons of steel going up in just six days. The project's backed by a $1 billion raise from September, with Nvidia in the mix as a partner. The goal? Make quantum computing actually useful for commercial stuff, especially next-gen AI supercomputers.

Here's where it gets interesting for crypto. Scientists say a million-qubit machine would be as powerful as hundreds of billions of regular computers. And that kind of power? Enough to crack Bitcoin's encryption. Bitcoin devs are already talking about whether to hard fork and deal with the quantum threat preemptively. A recent preprint paper suggested you'd need around 100,000 qubits to crack a 2048-bit key. Bitcoin uses 256-bit keys. For context, the biggest quantum computer out there right now is from Caltech—6,100 qubits. So we're not there yet, but the gap is closing.

PsiQuantum co-founder Terry Rudolph tried to calm things down back in July, saying they're not planning to use their machines to derive private keys from public ones. And CoinShares did a study in February that might also help folks sleep better: only about 10,230 Bitcoin are both quantum-vulnerable and have publicly visible encryption keys. At current prices, that's around $728 million. Still a lot, but not the whole market.