What if you could fit a quantum computer with a million physical qubits into a space smaller than a sticky note? Insane?
That’s the vision of Quantum Art, a new quantum computing company founded just three years ago and led by Tal David, the former head of Israel’s national quantum initiative. The company is building modular, reconfigurable quantum processors using trapped ion technology—promising an order of magnitude leap in density, scalability, and compute efficiency.
In our TechFirst conversation, Tal shared the four innovations that form the foundation of their architecture. Check it out, and subscribe to my YouTube channel …
Multi-qubit gates: playing chords, not notes
Most quantum systems today execute operations sequentially—one or two qubits at a time. Quantum Art flips that model.
“Instead of doing what the industry is doing for many, many years—single operations on single qubits or two qubits, one after the other—we said, OK, we can go beyond that,” Tal says.
By using spectrally engineered laser pulses, Quantum Art performs simultaneous operations on tens of qubits, collapsing thousands of potential two-qubit interactions into a single physical operation.
“Instead of playing my guitar note by note, we play chords.”
This innovation drastically reduces both runtime and error rates, tackling two of the biggest challenges in quantum hardware today.
2. Optical segmentation of long ion chains
Rather than break up their system into physically separate traps (as is common in trapped ion computing), Quantum Art keeps a single, long ion chain and uses laser-defined barriers—a kind of optical tweezing—to partition it into independently operating cores.
“We pinpoint a couple of ions here and there and do not allow them to move,” Tal explains. “Thereby, these ions now become barriers.”
This enables 20 or more parallel cores, each with 50+ qubits, operating without crosstalk and ready for mid-circuit measurement—a key for scalable error correction.
3. Reconfigurable quantum arrays—like an FPGA for qubits
In traditional ion trap architectures, communication between segments means physically shuttling ions—a slow, error-prone process.
Quantum Art skips that completely.
“We’re not moving the ions around. We’re moving the information around,” says Tal. “We’re shutting off the tweezers in one configuration and turning them on in a new configuration… in a microsecond.”
This allows the system to dynamically rewire its structure to perform operations between cores, enabling massively parallel, fault-tolerant quantum computation. Tal compares it to reconfiguring an FPGA, a Field-Programmable Gate Array:
“We are doing that with reconfiguring the lasers, thereby reorganizing how the qubits are connected together in a very, very massive way.”
4. Million-qubit scaling in a 50×50mm footprint
Perhaps the most staggering claim: a roadmap to 1 million physical qubits in just 50×50 millimeters. That’s the size of a watch face or half a credit card.
“A thousand-ion chain is about five millimeters long,” Tal says. “So now if you take a few of those and assemble them into a mesh of rows and columns, you can get to extremely dense two-dimensional arrays.”
Because they’re not moving ions or connecting external systems, the whole QPU stays compact. The full system—chamber, lasers, and control hardware—fits in just four to five 19” server racks, consuming only tens of kilowatts.
“We have a viable roadmap to go to a million qubits in a very small footprint… without having to deal with interconnecting challenges at all.”
Near-term targets and long-term vision
Quantum Art isn’t just focused on 2033.
A 1,000 physical qubit system is coming as early as 2027, David says, supporting up to 100 logical qubits … enough to surpass classical supercomputers for some applications.
Their error correction targets? Just 10 physical qubits per logical qubit, thanks to trapped ion coherence times and efficient architectures.
“We’ve spent our time now de-risking all of the conceptual risks… now we need to bring all of these building blocks together and go to scale.”
Beyond the tech, Tal says the company’s goals include business success, national capability for Israel, and human impact. They’re already pursuing real-world applications in aerospace, automotive, communications, logistics, and quantum machine learning.
Why Quantum “Art”
I also asked David about the company’s name … why “art?” Turns out, it’s not just a poetic nod to the complexity of quantum mechanics.
“We really feel that we’re making a work of art,” Tal says. “The innovation and creativity that is manifested in our architecture really is artful.”
It also happens to be an acronym: Amit, Rai, and Tal … the three founders.
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Watch the full episode on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’re skeptical of quantum’s ability to scale or just curious about where the real breakthroughs are happening, this is one you won’t want to miss.
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