India, Dec. 4 -- Wiping our shoes, we enter a sparkling glass-walled room with vibration-absorbent floors and separate dedicated earthing. A cylinder hangs in the middle with gold-plated copper layers sitting inside a dilution refrigerator. Wires, cables, monitors and pipes emerge in and out of the cylinder like an organised Hydra. Some pipes go into two other rooms - one houses the compressed helium, the other one the invertor. The cables go into racks that further feed into computers . A loud cling-cling sound of the pulse tube overwhelms the glassed-in room, making talking difficult.

All of this infrastructure, as well as the 150 people team of startup QPiAI revolve around one 6cm-sized, 64-qubit quantum processing chip that this cyli...