Intel has about 70 people on quantum and Lip-Bu Tan is betting its fabs give it an edge

[Pete]

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan's appearance on the QuantumJane podcast, and it gives a clearer picture of where Intel sits in the quantum race. Tan said the company has about 70 people working on quantum and is developing silicon spin qubits. The key point is that Intel is testing whether those qubits can eventually be produced in its own fabrication plants

Spin qubits use the spin of electrons in silicon, which lets Intel reuse techniques from conventional chip manufacturing. Its Tunnel Falls chip was built with industrial transistor fabrication methods with scale and volume production in mind. Tan's argument is that working out which technology approach wins is only half the problem, and the other half is mass production. That is where he thinks a company with a serious fab plays a different role from most startups

What I appreciated is that he didn't claim spin qubits have won. He said openly that there are many methods, that people should try different approaches, and that the verdict is still out. Quantum computing is still split among superconducting circuits, trapped ions, photonics, neutral atoms and spin qubits, and nobody has a clear lead on every front

Tan is also personally backing Israeli startup Classiq, which makes software for building quantum applications without working directly with the hardware. He described their ambition as becoming the next Cadence for quantum computing, a nod to the chip design software company he used to run. Classiq was founded in 2020 and, after a $110 million Series C in May 2025 and follow-on investment from SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and CDP Venture Capital, has raised up to around $200 million in total. Tan said he liked the team's technical depth and the fact they were already working with customers

He also said quantum could end up ten times bigger than AI running on classical computing, which is a big claim, while stressing that it is still very early. Seventy people is a small team for a company Intel's size. It reads to me like a long-term option on a manufacturing advantage rather than an all-in bet

From a security angle, whoever cracks mass production is the one to watch. A lab demo does not threaten anybody's keys, but a fab turning out qubit chips at volume would change the picture quickly

Intel has 70 people working on quantum computing. Its CEO is betting on the next frontier | CTechwww.calcalistech.com

[BrokenDave72]

Seventy people is tiny compared with IBM or Google's quantum groups. It fits a company that is under financial pressure and needs to pick its battles. The fab angle is the only thing that makes spin qubits a sensible bet for Intel. If manufacturing turns out to be the bottleneck, they have a head start nobody else can easily copy. If it turns out to be physics, they are just another player

[ShawnMichaels99]

Backing a software startup while running a hardware effort is a sensible hedge. Hardware-agnostic tools win regardless of which qubit type takes over

[Rachel_29]

Owning a fab is a real moat in theory

In practice Intel's fabs have struggled to hit schedules even for classical chips. Adding qubits to that mix doesn't fill me with confidence

[Thomas_61]

Calling quantum ten times bigger than AI is the sort of line CEOs say on podcasts. It makes a nice clip. The rest of the interview is far more measured, which is reassuring. I would focus on the parts where he admits the verdict is open

[Rogue Sam]

Classiq as the next Cadence is actually a smart framing. Chip designers stopped thinking about individual transistors decades ago, and quantum developers will need the same kind of abstraction. Whoever owns that layer could end up more valuable than many hardware makers

[Wizard]

Tunnel Falls was a solid proof of concept, but the qubit counts are still small. Spin qubits have great density potential, though they have been slower to scale than people hoped

[EarlyBird]

Spin qubits get dismissed a lot, but they have real advantages. They are tiny, they use a mature material, and they can in principle be packed very densely

The weak point has been uniformity between qubits. Every qubit behaves slightly differently, which makes control hard at scale. If Intel's fabs can reduce that variation, the picture changes

[Bruno]

Hearing a CEO say it is still very early is refreshing after a year of breathless press releases

Intel doesn't need to win the race right now. It needs to be ready if manufacturing becomes the deciding factor. That is a reasonable strategy for a company with its history