Atlantic Quantum has announced it will be joining up with Google Quantum AI to accelerate the team’s progress in creating fault tolerant quantum computers. It is not yet known right now what is exactly meant by “Joining Up” as it could indicate an acquisition, a development partnership, employee hire and asset purchase, or some other arrangement between the two companies, but we expect this to be clarified in the future.
Atlantic Quantum, which was spun out from an MIT lab in 2022, has offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Gothenburg, Sweden. The company brings in some interesting technologies which could be quite interesting for Google’s quantum computing efforts. This includes fluxonium-based superconducting qubits which can provide much better qubit fidelities than the transmon qubits used currently by Google. The company had previously reported fidelities exceeding 99.9% for two-qubit gates and 99.997% for single-qubit gates. The company also reported it has created the world’s first quantum integrated circuit, which combines controls and qubits into a single modular chip stack inside the cryostat. Atlantic Quantum also has software assets which may or may not be valuable to the combined group. These include Svalbard, a database for storing experimental data, and Shipyard, a compiler for OpenQASM, an open-source language for quantum circuits. The Shipyard software may possibly be redundant with Google’s Cirq software since they both appears to be performing similar functions.
Both Google and Atlantic Quantum were selected as participants in Stage A of DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI) and it is quite possible that the merging together of their two technologies will help them make it to Stage B. In addition, Atlantic Quantum has been a participant in several other partnership and grant programs with organizations including MIT, US Air Force, Riverlane, US Department of Energy, and SCALINQ. It is not known if these programs will all continue.
A blog post announcing this development has been posted on the Google Quantum AI website here.
October 2, 2025
