QpiAI opens a quantum chip foundry in Bengaluru, with a line of sight to 10,000 qubits

India's quantum ambitions have so far been measured in qubits demonstrated. This week they were measured in something harder to fake: a factory. On 17 August 2026, Bengaluru-based quantum and AI company QpiAI said it had opened a quantum processor manufacturing facility in the city — a foundry capable of fabricating superconducting chips with up to 128 qubits, which the company describes as one of the largest such facilities in Asia.

It is a significant shift in posture. Building a quantum computer is one thing; building the plant that makes the chips inside it is another, and it is exactly the kind of vertical, in-country capability that India's National Quantum Mission has been trying to seed.

What the foundry actually does

The facility is designed to handle the full front-to-back sequence of quantum-chip fabrication in-house — lithography, etching, assembly and packaging — rather than outsourcing the hard steps to overseas fabs. According to QpiAI, the line can currently produce superconducting processors of up to 128 qubits, and the company intends to scale manufacturing capacity toward 10,000 physical qubits in 2027.

Crucially, the foundry is not wedded to a single flavour of quantum hardware. QpiAI says it will support research and production across superconducting, photonic and semiconductor (spin) qubit approaches — a hedge that matters at this stage of the technology, when it is still not settled which physical platform will win at scale.

The money behind it

QpiAI says it has invested roughly $20 million to $25 million in the facility, with a further $10 million to $15 million planned as it expands manufacturing and builds out proposed quantum-AI computing centres. Those are modest figures next to the billions that superconducting-qubit leaders in the United States are spending, but for an Indian startup they represent a serious commitment to owning the means of production rather than renting them.

The economic logic is the same one driving India's semiconductor push: a chip you can design but not fabricate at home is a chip whose supply someone else controls. By pulling fabrication onshore, QpiAI is betting that control of the manufacturing stack — not just clever device design — will be the durable advantage in quantum.

How QpiAI got here

The foundry is the latest step in a fast sequence. QpiAI made its name by putting working superconducting machines on the board early — including one of India's first 25-qubit superconducting quantum computers — and by unveiling its 'Kaveri' superconducting chip as it pushed toward higher qubit counts. It has also been one of the private companies selected to help deliver on the National Quantum Mission, the multi-year, roughly ₹6,000-crore programme through which the government is trying to build indigenous quantum hardware, communications and sensing.

Seen in that light, the foundry is less a standalone announcement than the natural consequence of a company that has decided its constraint is manufacturing, not ideas. If you want to iterate quickly on chip designs — trying new qubit layouts, materials and packaging — waiting months for an overseas fab to run your wafers is a bottleneck. An in-house line collapses that loop.

Where it fits in India's quantum year

The timing is telling. India's quantum ecosystem has had a busy few weeks: the Tamil Nadu government signed memoranda of understanding with four quantum-technology ventures at its investment conclave, and industry-academia hubs have been standing up middleware and control-electronics efforts. Against that backdrop, a working chip foundry is the piece the ecosystem has most conspicuously lacked — the bridge between a research demonstration and a repeatable, manufacturable product.

It would be a mistake to over-read a single facility. A 128-qubit fabrication capability today, and a target of 10,000 physical qubits next year, are statements of intent that still have to survive contact with the brutal realities of quantum error rates, coherence times and yield. Physical qubits are not logical qubits; scaling the count is necessary but nowhere near sufficient for useful, fault-tolerant computing. Independent benchmarking of what actually comes off the line will be the real test.

Why it still matters

Even with those caveats, the direction is unambiguous. For most of the past decade, "quantum in India" meant papers, prototypes and roadmaps. A foundry is infrastructure — the unglamorous, capital-hungry base layer that a domestic industry has to sit on. By putting fabrication, packaging and multiple qubit modalities under one Bengaluru roof, QpiAI is trying to move India from demonstrating quantum devices to manufacturing them.

Whether the 10,000-qubit target arrives on schedule matters less than the fact that, for the first time, there is now a place in the country built to try.

Sources

• The Quantum Insider — "QpiAI Opens Quantum Chip Foundry in India, Targets 10,000-Qubit Processors" (17 August 2026): https://thequantuminsider.com/2026/08/17/qpiai-opens-quantum-chip-foundry-in-india-targets-10000-qubit-processors/
• YourStory — "QpiAI opens 'Asia's largest' quantum chip foundry, targets 10,000-qubit processors" (August 2026): https://yourstory.com/2026/08/qpiai-asia-largest-quantum-chip-foundry-targets-10000-qubit-processors
• Data Center Dynamics — "QpiAI launches 25-qubit superconducting quantum computer in India": https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/qpiai-launches-25-qubit-superconducting-quantum-computer-in-india/