A quantum computer big enough to do useful work will need a great deal of conventional computing wrapped around it, and AMD wants to supply it. The chipmaker plans to take an equity stake in PsiQuantum, the Palo Alto startup building photonic quantum computers, as part of a wider partnership the two companies disclosed Thursday. Neither side said how much AMD will invest.
The deal would move AMD from component vendor to partner and shareholder. PsiQuantum had already picked AMD’s Versal FPGAs for its fault-tolerant platform. The new arrangement adds Instinct GPUs, EPYC CPUs and the ROCm software stack, and the companies will co-design the infrastructure needed to run utility-scale machines along with applications that mix quantum, high-performance and AI computing. For AMD, that puts its data center lineup behind the classical computing that operates PsiQuantum’s machines.
“We see that same opportunity with quantum computing, where leadership in classical computing is essential to building systems at scale,” Mark Papermaster, AMD’s chief technology officer, said in the joint announcement, comparing the work to AMD’s record in supercomputers and AI infrastructure.
Some of the joint work is already running. PsiQuantum researchers tuned a machine-learning decoder called PRISM to run with low latency on programmable hardware accelerators, a piece of the real-time error correction a large photonic machine will depend on. The companies also said PsiQuantum’s computational chemistry methods, run on AMD GPUs, have produced early results in simulating covalent inhibitors, a class of molecules used in cancer drug research. PsiQuantum plans to build on that and explore accelerated computing products for commercial use, starting with pharmaceutical research and drug discovery.
PsiQuantum CEO Victor Peng pointed to a second payoff beyond quantum. The partnership will cover “new approaches for networking with silicon photonics and scaling the foundations of next-gen AI,” he said. PsiQuantum says its photonic design lets it build on high-volume semiconductor manufacturing and existing cryogenic infrastructure.
A crowded cap table
AMD would join a long list of backers. PsiQuantum raised $1 billion at a $7 billion valuation in September 2025 in a round led by BlackRock, Temasek and Baillie Gifford, with Nvidia’s venture arm, NVentures, among the new investors, according to participant Qatar Investment Authority. In May, the Commerce Department signed a letter of intent for $100 million in planned CHIPS Act funding for PsiQuantum’s work on electro-optic materials, high-temperature single-photon detectors and low-loss photonic packaging, with the government taking a minority, non-controlling stake.
The announcement landed a day after IBM, which builds superconducting machines, updated its own roadmap. IBM said Wednesday its Nighthawk r3 processor will be built to run 10,000 operations on 520 programmable qubits, and that it plans to link two of them into a 1,040-qubit system in 2027. AMD, which began shipping its 256-core Venice EPYC chips this week, is betting on the classical hardware and software around the qubits rather than on a qubit design of its own. Intel took a different route last month when it agreed to buy quantum software firm Classiq.
The two companies are also weighing a presence at the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park in Chicago, where PsiQuantum is the anchor tenant. They plan to share more about the partnership at the SC26 supercomputing conference, which runs Nov. 15-20 in the same city.
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