“Most people underestimate manufacturing completely in this process… I watched at the beginning a lot of, you know, I would call them heavy-hitting teams outsourcing manufacturing and thinking it's just going to work. And I'm like, I inherently have done manufacturing my whole life and it's not easy… You can't outsource the manufacturing. It's critical to the operation at this point.”
The New Quantum Era - innovation in quantum computing, science and technology · October 2026
Simmons, who leads a company building silicon qubits atom by atom, on what other quantum computing efforts get wrong. Just before this she criticized companies that hire large software teams before the hardware exists. Her own roadmap is modelled on the history of the classical chip industry.
Transcript
…now where lots of people are buying, you know, bringing into their company massive software teams when the hardware is still not there. So trying to grow the company organically, bringing people in when we need it. Yeah. Looking far enough ahead, but not like squandering lots of money on the way.
…And that's, I mean, this is, we've overused the phrase paradigm shift way too much. Yeah. So this is a real new paradigm of computing. And in many ways, like you were saying, we have reset the clock to first transistor, first integrator, those types of milestones. That's just a different timeframe.
And the other thing I think is amazing that most people underestimate manufacturing completely in this process. Yeah. So they, I watched at the beginning a lot of, you know, I would call them heavy-hitting teams outsourcing manufacturing and thinking it's just going to work. And I'm like, I inherently have done manufacturing my whole life and it's not easy. So you've got to have rigor and you've got to have a deep understanding and you have to integrate it in the people that use it. You can't outsource the manufacturing. It's critical to the operation at this point. I mean,
this is at its heart a revolution in manufacturing. It's really quantum design engineering and manufacturing is what we're tackling. And the computing comes along for free. And so another thing I think is really interesting, you were the inaugural editor-in-chief of MPJ Quantum, Quantum…
question. So, you know, I have, I have, and I think I've found it actually personally quite a struggle because I'm trained as a physicist to look at the truth and to really understand things deeply and get to the bottom of things. So then when I see people saying things that I know to be very…
Yeah. Yeah. It is tricky at times. And I mean, a big part of what motivates me is trying to communicate the real essence of what's happening in a way that's more accessible because there's also all of the expertise, the specialization, the jargon that gets it. It's hard.