AMD Takes Equity Stake in PsiQuantum, Widens Quantum Deal

AMD will take an equity stake in PsiQuantum as the two companies expand a quantum computing partnership that now reaches from Versal FPGAs into Instinct GPUs, EPYC CPUs and the ROCm software stack. Neither company disclosed the size of the investment, which was announced on Thursday.

The deal widens an existing arrangement. PsiQuantum, the Palo Alto photonic quantum computing company founded in 2016, already uses AMD's Versal FPGAs — programmable chips that process the stream of measurements coming off its qubits — in its fault-tolerant design. The expanded agreement adds Instinct GPUs for large-scale simulation and EPYC server CPUs, with the companies aiming to combine ROCm with PsiQuantum's silicon photonics into a hybrid quantum, HPC and AI system.

Mark Papermaster, AMD's chief technology officer, said classical computing leadership is essential to building quantum systems at scale. That is the commercial logic of the deal: the quantum machine is only as good as the classical silicon that feeds it.

How fast is the decoder?

The technical anchor of the partnership is a preprint posted on Nov. 10. In it, PsiQuantum describes PRISM, a machine-learning decoder for real-time error correction in photonic quantum computers, and reports results from AMD hardware.

PRISM is a transformer-based decoder that exploits the known locations of photon-loss errors. On an AMD VP1902 FPGA, it decoded distance-8 logical blocks with a latency of 6.59 microseconds and an amortized time of 1.56 microseconds per block. PsiQuantum says this matches the error rates of slower integer-programming decoders while running considerably faster.

The latency figure matters because decoders must keep pace with the machine. A quantum computer that corrects errors more slowly than they arise cannot run long calculations. PsiQuantum's researchers worked with AMD to optimize PRISM for low-latency operation on programmable hardware, and the preprint is the evidence that the optimization worked.

Where will the machines live?

The first application target is drug discovery. Using PsiQuantum's computational chemistry methods running on AMD GPUs, the companies reported early results simulating covalent inhibitors — a class of molecules used in cancer drugs. The work fits within the Department of Energy's Quantum Genesis Priority Applications.

The companies will also explore a footprint at the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park in Chicago, where PsiQuantum is the anchor tenant. They plan to share more details at the SC26 supercomputing conference in Chicago, which runs Nov. 15 to 20. The venue is convenient. IBM switched on its first Illinois quantum system in Chicago earlier this month, so the competitive geography is already drawn.

What is PsiQuantum worth?

PsiQuantum raised $1 billion in September 2025 at a $7 billion valuation, in a round that included Nvidia's venture arm, NVentures. Its chief executive is Victor Peng, the former Xilinx executive who now leads the company he once sold chips alongside, in effect.

That funding history frames AMD's move. Nvidia has already bought a financial position in PsiQuantum through NVentures, and AMD's equity stake keeps it inside a company that has become one of the best-capitalized bets on photonic quantum computing. The undisclosed amount leaves observers to guess at the terms; the direction, however, is clear.

For AMD, the arrangement extends a classical computing franchise — FPGAs, GPUs, CPUs and ROCm — into a system architecture where each layer has a role. For PsiQuantum, it secures silicon partners with a decoder result already in print. Expect the SC26 sessions in Chicago to show whether the hybrid stack can move beyond preprints toward deployed systems.