Mitsubishi Electric Invests In Optical Quantum Computer Hardware Developer OptQC

Mitsubishi Electric has invested in OptQC through its ME Innovation Fund, backing a Japanese startup developing optical quantum computer hardware designed for large-scale systems. Financial terms of the investment were not disclosed.

The transaction represents the ME Innovation Fund’s 16th investment and gives Mitsubishi Electric exposure to an emerging quantum computing architecture that could offer advantages in scalability and energy efficiency.

OptQC originated from the University of Tokyo and was established around technologies developed by the university’s Furusawa Laboratory, a research group focused on optical quantum computing.

Optical quantum computing uses photons as the basis for quantum information processing.

Mitsubishi Electric sees the approach as particularly promising as quantum computing moves from research toward industrial applications that could require substantially larger numbers of qubits.

One of the challenges associated with scaling quantum computers is that increasing the number of qubits can also significantly increase the physical size, complexity and energy requirements of the underlying hardware.

OptQC has developed a proprietary architecture intended to limit increases in system size as qubit counts rise.