Dilution refrigerators, Bluefors, Helsinki

Cold, the bottleneck of quantum

The quantum race is counted in qubits; it also turns on the number of refrigerators. Every superconducting or spin processor, the path followed by IBM, Google and nearly all Western players, exists only inside a dilution refrigerator that cools it below 10 millikelvin, colder than interstellar space. This machine is not built in a garage: it comes, for the most part, from a Finnish company founded in 2008 and its British alter ego Oxford Instruments.

This de facto duopoly, concentrating more than two-thirds of the market, effectively sets the sector's tempo: delivery times for a high-end system are counted in months, and every scaling roadmap runs into the production capacity of Helsinki and Abingdon before it runs into the physics of the qubits. The most critical country for quantum computing may be Finland, ahead of the United States or China.

Helium-3 comes from nuclear warheads

The heart of the cryostat, the circuit that produces the extreme cold by dilution, consumes helium-3, an isotope so rare it can hardly be extracted from nature. Its only source at scale is the decay of tritium… stored in nuclear arsenals. In other words, every Western quantum computer depends on a gas issued from the dismantling of American warheads, with Russia the other historic holder.

This strategic lineage makes helium-3 a bottleneck within the bottleneck: its availability depends on a military by-product doled out sparingly by the Department of Energy, and its prices have seen spectacular surges since the 2000s. A Bluefors cryostat thus stacks several upstream locks, helium-3, pulse-tube cold heads from an American-Japanese duopoly, superconducting NbTi coaxial cables, each of which alone would suffice to slow the entire industry.

Dossier sources