Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us for Rigetti's first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. I'm pleased to be joined today by our Chief Financial Officer, Jeff Bertelsen, who will walk you through our financial results in more detail following my overview.

Also with us is our Chief Technology Officer, David Rivas, who will be available to participate in the Q&A session following our prepared remarks. We appreciate your continued interest in Rigetti, and we look forward to answering your questions at the conclusion of our remarks.

Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that today's call, along with our first quarter 2026 press release, contains forward-looking statements. These statements reflect our current expectations, objectives, and underlying assumptions regarding our outlook and future operating results.

These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated. Such risks and uncertainties are described and discussed in greater detail in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our Form 10-K for the year ended December 31st, 2025, our Form 10-Q for the three months ended March 31st, 2026, and other periodic reports filed by the company from time to time with the SEC.

We encourage you to review these filings for a comprehensive discussion of these risks and uncertainties that could cause actual events and results to differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements. Rigetti undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements made during this call, except as required by law.

During today's call, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. For details on these measures and reconciliations to comparable GAAP measures and for further information regarding the factors that may affect Rigetti's future operating results, please refer to today's earnings release on Rigetti's website at investors.rigetti.com or to the 8-K furnished with the SEC today after the close.

Before I begin, I want to frame today's discussion around three key takeaways. First, with the general availability of our 108-qubit Cepheus-1 108Q system on Rigetti Quantum Cloud Services, Amazon Braket, Microsoft Azure Quantum, and QBraid, we believe we have delivered one of the most powerful generally available quantum computers in the world and the largest modular quantum computing system on the market today.

Second, we are seeing growing adoption of Rigetti systems across government, academic, and commercial customers, including new on-premises Novera QPU sales that support meaningful year-over-year revenue growth. Third, we remain focused on disciplined execution against our roadmap to quantum advantage, continuing to improve fidelity on Cepheus-1 108Q and advancing toward higher-qubit, higher-fidelity chiplet-based systems, underpinned by a strong balance sheet and prudent capital deployment.

Now, I'll step back and put the quarter in context. Q1 was an important proof point in our strategy to combine technical progress with real-world access and usage.

Quantum computing remains a long-cycle opportunity, but we are increasingly seeing the ecosystem coalesce around platforms that can scale in a practical way and that are available to users where they already run their workloads. Our progress this quarter reflects that reality.

Let me start with our technology and product milestones. Last month, we announced the general availability of our 108-qubit Cepheus-1 108Q quantum computing system, accessible to customers via Rigetti Quantum Cloud Services and through Amazon Braket, the quantum computing service by AWS, as well as Microsoft's Azure Quantum service and QBraid.

Cepheus-1 108Q is our highest qubit-count system to date and the industry's largest modular quantum computing system, built from 12 interconnected 9-qubit chiplets. This system triples the number of qubits and chiplets from our previous 36-qubit Cepheus-1 36Q system and, more importantly, validates our proprietary chiplet-based scaling architecture in a production setting.

Today, Cepheus-1 108Q has achieved a median two-qubit gate fidelity of approximately 99.1% with gate speeds of roughly 60 nanoseconds and a median single-qubit gate fidelity of 99.9%. These are meaningful performance levels at this scale, and we expect to continue improving fidelity throughout 2026 as we refine the performance of our individual chiplets, innovate across materials and fabrication, and incorporate learnings from our prototype and R&D platforms.

We achieved a median 99.8% two-qubit gate fidelity with 40-nanosecond gate speeds on our 9-qubit system by using a proprietary adiabatic CZ gate scheme. Leveraging this same gate scheme, we also demonstrated two-qubit gate fidelities as high as 99.9% at 28-nanosecond gate speeds on a prototype system, and those advancements are informing how we operate Cepheus-1 108Q and design future systems.

From a systems engineering perspective, this launch is about more than just adding qubits. During development, we identified and mitigated coupling interactions between tunable couplers that become more pronounced beyond the 100-qubit scale.

By refining our chip architecture to address those interactions, we effectively shifted the primary performance limitation from coupler behavior to coherence time, which we are confident we can address as we continue to optimize our entire stack. I also want to highlight what this means for users.

With Cepheus-1 108Q now available on Rigetti QCS, Amazon Braket, Microsoft Azure Quantum, and QBraid, researchers and enterprises can access our highest qubit-count system on platforms they already use for classical and quantum R&D. Cepheus-1 108Q is the first gate-based device on Amazon Braket with more than 100 qubits, offering improved fidelities that enable wider and deeper circuits for applications such as materials science, optimization, and quantum simulation.

AWS is a leader in cloud infrastructure, extending our relationship with Amazon Braket, and now Azure Quantum and QBraid, is an important validation of our technology and our go-to-market strategy. Stepping back, we continue to believe that superconducting gate-based quantum computing with chiplet-based scaling offers a compelling combination of speed and scalability.

Our current systems achieve gate speeds on the order of 50 to 70 nanoseconds, which is roughly 1,000 times faster than some other alternative modalities, such as trapped-ion or neutral-atom systems. As we scale, we intend to maintain those speed advantages while driving fidelity higher and integrating error-correction-ready gate operations into the stack.

Let me now turn to customer momentum and market traction. Our strategy is to meet customers where they are, whether that is on the public cloud, on hybrid infrastructure, or in dedicated quantum centers.

On the cloud side, the combination of Rigetti QCS, Amazon Braket, Microsoft Azure Quantum, and QBraid provides global access to our systems, including Cepheus-1 108Q, and we are seeing strong interest from researchers who want to experiment on one of the most capable generally available gate-based platforms in the market today. In parallel, we continue to expand our base of on-premises Novera QPUs.

The Novera QPU is designed to integrate into a customer's existing cryogenic and control systems, providing a high-performance on-premises platform for quantum R&D. Recent Novera wins include an order from the University of Saskatchewan, where our QPU will support quantum research and education, and we have also announced Novera QPU and Novera system sales to additional research organizations globally.

These on-premises systems deepen technical engagement, create multi-year usage pathways, and showcase the flexibility of our product portfolio from 9 to more than 100 qubits. As discussed in our prior call, Novera and other system deliveries contribute to significant year-over-year growth, albeit with some variability quarter-to-quarter based on shipment timing and contract mix.

For example, we expect a meaningful portion of previously announced Novera purchase orders to be recognized in the first half of 2026, and we are executing on additional system-level contracts, such as the C-DAC order we announced earlier this year. While the timing of revenue recognition can move between quarters, these contracts underscore growing demand for Rigetti QPUs and systems among national labs, universities, and quantum computing centers.

We are also encouraged by continued engagement from commercial customers who are exploring quantum-inspired and hybrid use cases. While commercial revenue remains early, we are seeing increased interest from industries such as materials, logistics, and financial services as they look to understand where quantum computing can augment classical high-performance computing over time.

More broadly, we are starting to see tangible examples of how even relatively small-scale quantum systems can impact real-world workloads. For example, a team in China recently demonstrated that a 9-qubit quantum system could outperform classical reservoir networks with thousands of nodes on a realistic weather forecasting task, highlighting how modest-sized quantum devices can begin to disrupt AI and modeling applications.

We view results like this as early validation of the commercial opportunities that systems like our Novera QPUs and Cepheus-class devices are positioned to address as they mature. Let me briefly connect this back to our long-term roadmap.

We remain focused on a clear sequence of milestones that we believe positions Rigetti to reach quantum advantage in roughly three years. Near term, that means driving Cepheus-1 108Q to a median two-qubit gate fidelity of approximately 99.5% later this year while maintaining our gate speed advantages.

Beyond that, we are working toward deploying systems that leverage our chiplet-based architecture as the foundation for eventually scaling more than 1,000 qubits with fidelities and gate speeds that support error-mitigated and, ultimately, fault-tolerant computation. In support of this roadmap, we recently announced our intention to invest up to $100 million in the United Kingdom over the next several years to accelerate quantum computing development.

This will be our first major investment outside the United States and builds on our existing 36-qubit system deployment at the UK's National Quantum Computing Centre, as well as the UK government's multi-billion-dollar commitment to quantum technologies. In parallel, we continue to collaborate with partners, such as Riverlane and others, to integrate error-correction-ready capabilities into the stack.

This includes support for high-fidelity native gates, improved circuit compilation, and control electronics enhancements that are designed to be compatible with future error-corrected architectures. Our intention is to update our published technology roadmap later this year once we have incorporated operational data from Cepheus-1 108Q and can provide more detail on the specific steps we expect to take toward quantum advantage.

Turning to the financial framework, our approach remains straightforward and disciplined. We exited last year with a strong cash position and no debt, giving us the flexibility to continue investing behind our technology roadmap and customer opportunities.

Our spending remains concentrated in core R&D, including fabrication, chip design, and control electronics development, along with the capex required to support higher qubit-count systems and the associated cryogenics infrastructure. While this results in elevated capex in the near term, we believe these investments are directly tied to the capabilities that will differentiate Rigetti in the market.

We are not managing the business around short-term revenue optimization; we are managing it around credible progress toward large-scale, high-fidelity quantum systems that can deliver commercially meaningful value. To that end, our capital allocation remains focused on organic execution, and we will consider M&A only where it can clearly accelerate our roadmap without compromising our financial discipline.

To close my remarks before turning it over to Jeff, I want to reiterate the three key messages we hope you take away from today's call. First, Cepheus-1 108Q is now generally available through Rigetti QCS, Amazon Braket, Microsoft Azure Quantum, and QBraid, and we believe it represents one of the most powerful, generally available, gate-based quantum computers in the world and the largest modular system on the market today.

Second, customer adoption continues to build across cloud and on-premises channels with Novera sales and other contracts, supporting strong year-over-year revenue growth and deepening our engagement with leading research institutions and emerging commercial users. Third, we remain committed to disciplined execution on a roadmap that targets quantum advantage in about three years, anchored in our chiplet-based architecture, high-speed superconducting qubits, improving fidelity, a strong balance sheet, and strategic initiatives, such as our planned $100 million UK investment, that enables us to invest with patience and control.

Thank you for your continued support and interest in Rigetti. I'll now turn the call over to our CFO, Jeff Bertelsen, who will walk you through our financial results in more detail.

Thank you, Subodh, and good afternoon, everyone. I will spend a few minutes walking through our first quarter 2026 financial results, our balance sheet, and how we are thinking about capital deployment as we continue to execute on the roadmap Subodh described.

For the first quarter of 2026, revenue was $4.4 million compared to $1.5 million in the first quarter of 2025. The year-over-year increase was driven primarily by on-premises Novera QPU deliveries and related contracts, as well as certain government and research projects.

Gross margin for the first quarter was 31% compared to approximately 30% in the first quarter of 2025. Our first quarter 2026 gross margin was impacted by contract mix, including a higher contribution from QPU and system deliveries that include lower-margin third-party refrigeration.

Total operating expenses for the first quarter were $27.3 million compared to $22.1 million in the same period last year. Spending remains concentrated in research and development, including engineering headcount, fabrication, and system integration, consistent with the priorities we outlined on our fourth quarter call.

Stock-based compensation for the quarter was $5.9 million compared to $4.2 million in the first quarter of 2025. Operating loss for the first quarter was $26.0 million compared to an operating loss of $21.6 million in Q1 2025.

On a GAAP basis, net income for the first quarter of 2026 was $33.1 million compared to net income of $42.6 million in the prior-year period. The first quarter of 2026 included $53.7 million of non-cash gains from the change in fair value of derivative warrant and earnout liabilities compared to $62.1 million in the prior-year period.

As a reminder, these non-cash fair value adjustments can introduce significant volatility into our GAAP results quarter-to-quarter and do not affect how we operate the business or allocate capital. On a non-GAAP basis, which excludes stock-based compensation and fair value adjustments to warrant and earnout liabilities, net loss for the quarter was $14.7 million or 4 cents per diluted share, compared to a non-GAAP net loss of approximately $15.3 million or 5 cents per diluted share in the first quarter of 2025.

Let me provide a bit more color on revenue drivers and how we are thinking about the remainder of the year. As we outlined in our fourth quarter call, we expected strong year-over-year revenue growth in the first quarter of 2026, driven by shipment of a portion of the $5.7 million of on-premises Novera quantum computing system purchase orders announced late last year.

The first quarter results are consistent with that view, and we continue to expect the remaining Novera revenue to be recognized primarily in the second quarter of 2026. We also continue to execute on the $8.4 million C-DAC order for an on-premises 108-qubit system in India, which we expect to recognize in the fourth quarter of 2026 following installation and performance acceptance testing.

As we said last quarter, the initial C-DAC order did not include ongoing maintenance and support. We still expect to receive a separate purchase order for those services.

More broadly, our revenue profile continues to be influenced by the timing of system deliveries and government-funded projects. We continue to view this variability as inherent to the current stage of the market and not as a driver of our long-term capital allocation or technology strategy.

Turning to the balance sheet, we ended the first quarter of 2026 with approximately $569 million in cash, cash equivalents, and available-for-sale investments, compared with 200 $209.1 million as of March 31, 2025, and approximately $589.8 million at the end of 2025. The year-over-year increase relative to Q1 2025 reflects the capital raised and strategic investment activity we have previously discussed, while the sequential decline from year-end reflects ongoing operating spend and capital expenditures.

We continue to operate with no debt. At our current operating profile, we believe our capital position provides sufficient runway to execute against the technology and system deployment milestones we have laid out, including continued progress on scale, fidelity, and system integration, as well as our planned investment in the United Kingdom.

Capital expenditures in the quarter were primarily driven by investments in Fab-1 and additional dilution refrigeration capacity to support higher-qubit-count systems over the next several years, consistent with the framework we outlined in the fourth quarter. We continue to expect 2026 capex to be elevated relative to prior years, largely due to refrigeration and infrastructure needs rather than major changes to our fab footprint.

Our approach to capital deployment remains disciplined and consistent with what we have discussed on the Q4 call. The majority of our spending is directed toward core R&D activities that directly advance our technology platform, including our chiplet-based architecture, control systems, and cloud integration.

We are not managing the business around short-term revenue optimization; we're managing it around credible long-term progress toward quantum advantage in commercially relevant systems. To close, our financial strategy is unchanged from what we outlined last quarter.

We are focused on maintaining flexibility, funding innovation responsibly, and aligning capital deployment with the long-term value creation potential of our technology roadmap. While quarterly results will continue to reflect the early-stage nature of the quantum computing market and the timing of large system contracts, we believe our balance sheet and capital discipline position us to execute with patience and control.

With that, I will turn it back to the operator, who will open the call for your questions.

Great. Thanks so much for taking my questions.

I'll ask two. The first one is, can you talk about the announced NVIDIA Quantum models, when you expect they might be available, and when you might begin to test them to see the impact it has on reducing your error rates?

Thanks, Brian. NVIDIA did announce an open-source model, NVIDIA Ising, to help out with calibration and bring-up of quantum computers, as well as error corrections.

We continue to look at that as a possible means of accelerating our roadmap. We continue to talk to NVIDIA.

We also continue to talk to other partners in the industry, such as Riverlane in the UK, where we are partnering to do error correction. They are not replacements for each other; they can work in a complementary fashion.

Certainly, the announcement made by NVIDIA to help accelerate quantum computing in terms of calibration, bring-up, but also error correction, we are taking a close look and we'll definitely take advantage of those tools that are available now. Hopefully, that answers your question.

Great. My follow-up, the $100 million investment in the UK, is people, infrastructure, offices?

Then will that be expensed or capitalized, and if it's expensed, when will we start to see that begin to increase the opex?

Let me put that UK investment in context. UK has announced a fairly ambitious program that they call PROXIMUS, where it's a multi-stage program.

Right now, the first phase will kick off this July or August for a couple of years. The next phase that they call Mega-QuOP will kick off at that time for another year or two, and then Giga-QuOP and so on.

Mega-QuOP means 1 million error-free quantum operations per second. Giga-QuOP means 1 billion error-free quantum operations per second, and so on.

It's a very well-structured, laid-out program. Right now, applications are being requested.

We will be one of them. Assuming we are chosen for the preliminary phase, we definitely plan to increase our headcount, there will be additional people cost.

We definitely plan to increase the number of quantum computers we have in the UK. Right now, if you visit the National Quantum Computing Centre outside Oxford in the UK, you will find our quantum computer in that center.

For the next phase, we definitely plan to include our Cepheus-1, 108-qubit or higher-qubit-count quantum computers over there over the next couple of years as we make them available. There will be some capital cost involved, but also facilities.

Right now, our quantum computer sits in the NQCC facility. We have a relatively small office in London right now.

We definitely plan to have a bigger facility in the UK as we go forward. The $100 million is over the next few years, but captures all the cost in the rough order of magnitude that we talked about so far.

Hopefully, that answered your question.

Great, Subodh. Thank you so much.

Thanks, Brian.

Hi. Thanks for taking my question.

Subodh, I just wanted to ask you on the integrated error mitigation. Is this on-chip with the qubit gates, or is it a separate control chip?

Is it ASIC or FPGA? Could you give some color on that?

Krish, are you talking about the NVIDIA specific announcement?

The one you've spoke about, the integrated error mitigation, yeah.

In general, right now, we don't do error correction on the quantum chip itself. There are approaches that are being looked at to do that kind of stuff, but right now, our quantum chip is not doing error correction at the chip level.

Most of the error correction, and in all the experiments we do, are outside in the ambient conditions, in the control systems area, and we are sending the signals to the quantum computer and then getting them back from the quantum computer.

Got it. Then just a question on the QPU pipeline, how is that looking?

How has it evolved? Like is it over the last one, from what I understand, besides the University of Saskatchewan, is the funnel expanding?

Is it stable, or how to think about it?

You're talking about the overall demand for QPUs in general, I assume? That's what your question is.

That's right.

Yeah. As we mentioned, interest in quantum computing continues to increase rapidly.

As we start getting closer and closer to that quantum advantage, which we define roughly as 1,000 qubit, 99.9% two-qubit gate fidelity, less than 50-nanosecond gate speed, and some form of error mitigation or control, and we roughly think that's about three years from now. Definitely, we are already starting to see increase in interest from not only academic and government national lab kind of customers, but also commercial customers who want to do quantum computing-related R&D activities, not necessarily use them for their data center operations.

We definitely expect that interest to continue to increase rapidly as we get closer to the quantum advantage milestone roughly three years from now. We are already starting to see that, as you can see in our disclosures and sales numbers.

Overall, definitely expect quantum computing interest to increase, even though we are still in the R&D stages.

Thanks a lot, Subodh.

Thanks, Krish.

Thank you for taking the question. I guess, Subodh, just maybe a follow-up on Krish's question there, just with the adiabatic CZ process that you're already showing on prototypes getting to 99.9% two-qubit gate fidelity.

How long does that take to get into process? It sounds like you're targeting that 99.9% over a three-year period that would be part of this system that gets you to quantum advantage.

Why does it take so long to get there, or just what are the steps you need to bring that process from sort of a prototype level into kind of a higher volume production level?

It's a good question, Quinn. We will obviously push as fast as possible to get adiabatic CZ and fast gates into higher-scale systems.

We are already using adiabatic CZ in our Cepheus-1 108Q, but it's not a very fast-gate adiabatic CZ that we have been able to get at the prototype stage. You are right.

At the prototype stage, we have 99.9% with gate speeds of 28 nanoseconds, you can see that our 108Q is still 2x slower than our prototype system, and fidelity is not as high as the prototype system. We'll definitely take the learnings from the prototype system and try to include that in our larger-scale systems as soon as possible.

It just takes time. These are extremely complex problems to solve at scale.

It's relatively easy to demonstrate on prototype stages, and that's why you see many announcements from many different organizations about quantum computing, and they're typically in the sub-10-qubit-type level. It's only when you start getting to 100 qubit or above, and you hardly find two or three companies that have enabled quantum computers at that scale, and we are one of them.

We're proud to be one of them with the 108Q system right now that is available for anyone to use. That's where the problems becomes quite significant to tackle and solve.

We have demonstrated very, very good performance in adiabatic CZ fast gates at a few-qubit level. We need to take that learning and push it as fast as possible.

Definitely, it will be part of the final system that will approach quantum advantage in three years, but I'm pretty sure it will be included much before that in whatever we will start deploying next year and the year after that. You will definitely see adiabatic CZ and fast gates coming in there.

Got it. Then I just had a sort of related question.

As you look to that system that gives you quantum advantage, would you expect that system to run quantum error correction, or would you still be thinking about implementation of on-chip quantum error correction sort of being out beyond the quantum advantage chip in three-ish years?

It's a good question. There's a lot of TBD still right now on when it comes to quantum error correction specifically.

In an earlier question I touched upon NVIDIA's Ising model and how that could change, improve our roadmap, accelerate our roadmap. Our view right now is that the quantum advantage system, the roughly 1,000-qubit system at the 99.9% two-qubit gate fidelity level, will use some form of error mitigation, not necessarily full-fledged quantum error correction, the way we envision quantum error correction to be in roughly four, five years.

Our view is, for quantum advantage, we will have some form of error mitigation, error correction, but for a full implementation of QEC, particularly when we talk about like QLDPC, quantum low-density parity-check, kind of error correction, we're talking about fault-tolerant quantum computing, which we are talking about hundreds of thousands of qubits, and that we think is in the five- to seven-year kind of a timeline period. That's when you will really start talking quantum error correction in its full manner.

For the quantum advantage, we'll be talking error mitigation and some form of error correction. Hopefully, that answers your question.

That does. Appreciate it.

Then maybe just one quick one for Jeff. You said on the 5.7 of Novera QPU sales that you had announced last year, you expected to capture most of the remainder in the second quarter.

Looking at the Q you filed today, it looks like you had about $3 million of hardware-based sales. Is the remainder of that 5.7, roughly 2.7, be recognized in Q2?

Is that sort of the right ballpark to be thinking about how the 5.7 split between Q1 and Q2?

Of that 5.7, we recognized a little bit less than half of that in Q1, and then we expect the remainder to go in Q2.

Perfect. Okay.

Thank you.

Thanks, Quinn.

Thanks for taking the questions. Subodh, I wanted to start following up with some of the comments you made about the 108-qubit Cepheus's availability on Rigetti's QCS, and then on Amazon Braket and Microsoft Azure Quantum and QBraid.

The question is this: as it's attained general availability, what are you seeing in terms of engagement across the various platforms? Are you getting any feedback in terms of what the workload tests are framing up as?

Good question, Craig. It's still relatively early to talk about usage and what we are seeing, since we just deployed the system a month or so ago.

Definitely, interest is high. Definitely, we are seeing usage to be quite high, but it's too early to make judgments on the basis of early data.

Certainly, we expect this to be used very well over the next few months as word gets around and people explore and use it. We will continue to improve the system, as we mentioned.

We'll continue to improve the fidelities. We'll deploy higher-fidelity 108Q system sometime later this year.

We definitely expect usage to continue to improve as we improve the performance of the system.

That's helpful. Then the follow-up question relates to one of your partnerships.

We established the Quanta partnership in 1Q of '25. The investment in Rigetti was formalized in early 2Q '25.

As you look back at the first year of that deal, what would you identify as the top two or three things that are really going well and helping you in your ambition to scale up qubit count and system capabilities? What would be the one or two things that you would hope that partnership could do this year?

Thanks, Craig. That's a really good question.

We entered into a strategic partnership agreement with Quanta, as you mentioned. They did invest at that time about $40 million in Rigetti.

More importantly, there was a commitment on both sides to invest. We continue to invest in the quantum computing side.

Quanta investments are more on the non-quantum computing, but the rest of the hardware part of the stack. They have done that.

One of the key accomplishments we can point out to is how well they have designed the new control system that we have started including in our most recent offerings. Our latest deployments that we are talking about to commercial customers and other customers, we are exploring use of Quanta-made control systems instead of our home-built systems.

Quanta obviously is a large company with extremely high capabilities in CPU, GPU, cloud servers. They know how to build server boxes, control system electronics, and we can clearly see that their professionalism in building those boxes.

They have a dedicated team working on control systems that work with our systems. Going forward, we definitely will be using Quanta's control systems as part of our stack.

It's not an exclusive arrangement. We will continue to maintain our capabilities in that area, and Quanta will also talk to other quantum computing companies as well, it's not like a mutually exclusive thing.

We definitely are benefiting with Quanta's expertise in control systems, and we definitely expect them to be contributing to other parts of the stack. The first year, I would say definitely control system.

Next year or two, we expect them to not only continue to develop better-quality control systems meeting our overall system requirements, but also get into the rest of the hardware stack. Hopefully, that answers your question.

It does. Thank you.

Thanks, Craig.

Hi, Subodh and Jeff. Just a quick question.

As you look at the Cepheus 108-qubit one, any thoughts on what you're getting on the price uplift versus the 36-qubit one and how the customer response has been on the Cepheus 108-qubit as you show availability on Azure and Braket, etc.? A follow-up.

Vijay. It's still relatively early.

We deployed the system just over a month ago, it's still very early to talk about usage and what we're seeing. Definitely, interest is high.

Definitely, we are seeing a lot of customers use the system right now, but it's still early to quantify that and talk about uplift over 36Q in terms of usage. Regarding price, we really are still talking about research kind of customers.

We're not talking about jobs that are very long in duration. Most of the usage is on the order of a few seconds to a few minutes at the most, because people are still experimenting with quantum computing and fundamental understanding of quantum computing, how it can be used, basic algorithm development type research applications.

We are not really seeing commercial customers with data center-type operations trying to engage with quantum computing. Frankly, we shouldn't be seeing that for the next year or two.

It's only when we start approaching quantum advantage in about three years should we expect those kinds of engagements to increase on cloud quantum computers. Cepheus-108 is one of the most powerful quantum computers on the cloud that is generally available for anyone right now.

Definitely, I think leading usage of quantum computing is what we are seeing right now. As we continue to improve the performance, increase the qubit count, increase fidelity, we definitely expect more and more commercial customers to start using quantum computers.

Having said that, right now, we are still in the early stages, hard to quantify the usage and uplift over 36-qubit.

Got it. Then on the C-DAC, the $8.4 million win there, when do you start to see that layering into the guide, or when do you start to see shipments there?

Thanks.

As we have stated when we disclosed the order, our plan is to fulfill that order in the second half of this year, most likely in the Q4 time period. That's when we'll physically ship the 108-qubit system.

Quantum computer comprises various parts: dilution refrigerator, the parts inside, the cables, and all that stuff. Overall, our plan is to get them up and running before the end of this year, and that's when we expect most of our revenues to get booked.

Got it. Thank you.

Thanks, Vijay.

thank you. Thanks for taking my question.

Subodh, could you remind us how you remain confident of the architectural fix that you recently achieved with tunable couplers? How durable is that as you scale beyond 108 qubits to a few hundreds, eventually over 1,000 qubits?

That's a good question, Antoine, and we look at that very carefully as we continue to update our roadmap. Our fundamental architecture continues to be square grid and tunable couplers.

By the way, that's what we see other large companies do too. Google's architecture is similar to ours.

IBM recently changed their architecture from fixed coupler to tunable coupler technology, very similar to what we are doing right now. All three of us are deploying more or less similar architecture at that level.

Tunable couplers, we all like them because it gives you an extra degree of flexibility to adjust the coupling between the qubits. We definitely take advantage of that when it comes to parking the qubits at the right frequency and the couplers at the right frequency, too.

As of today, where the difference is coming in is our view is that when we scale up qubit count, we need chiplets. Far, we have not seen IBM, Google, or anyone else at least get data on chiplets.

We continue to monitor that area very closely. The reasons for the scale use of chiplets is because it's fundamentally a lot easier to build a smaller-dimension chiplet than a larger-dimension monolithic chip.

We have not seen any concerns with tunable coupler and a square-grid architecture because of using chiplets. We feel very confident that the roadmap we have from the current 108-qubit to improve the fidelity as well as the qubit count using chiplets is pretty solid, and we believe we will be able to execute it to get us to quantum advantage in roughly three years.

Understood. Thank you.

I'll get back in the queue.

Thank you, Antoine.

Hey, gentlemen. Thanks for taking my questions.

Subodh, just going right off what you just said here, if quantum advantage is three years away for you guys, is it safe to say that's two chip cycles away? I guess on that point, can you just talk about chip cycles?

Previously, it was probably nine months, you guys were spitting out new chips. Is this going to be a little slower going forward, 12, 18 months?

Any help on that would be great.

Troy, as we basically own our own fab, we have been operating our fab in Fremont, California, for the last several years. It depends on how many changes we do in the chip when it comes to chip cycle.

We do launch a major revision of the chip once a year, but, honestly, because we control our fab, we can do it much faster if we decide to just focus on some particular aspect of the chip. We can turn around chips at a faster rate than once a year, maybe even twice a year.

Three years gives us plenty of turns of chips in terms of major revisions. Certainly, a big part of getting to quantum advantage from where we are today comes from the chip side.

Don't forget there are other components coming on the stack that are quite important when it comes to quantum advantage: the design part of the chip obviously, but also the dilution refrigerator, the cabling, the control systems, the error correction, error mitigation parts, the software parts of the stack. All of them contribute in terms of the performance, and we need to keep improving on all parts of those to get to quantum advantage.

Three years, we think, is a realistic timeline. We have seen some other companies claim quantum advantage faster than that.

Frankly, we are a little skeptical. If you look at Cepheus right now, it's one of the best quantum computers in the world out there, if it's not one of the best, probably the best.

We think it still will take us roughly three years to get to quantum advantage. When there are companies out there who talk about quantum advantage this year, some of them also talked about quantum advantage last year, to be honest.

We remain skeptical when companies make all kinds of claims without any data to support that. We feel pretty good about Cepheus-1 performance right now at the 108-qubit level.

We think three years is a realistic timeline to get all the metrics in the right place to deliver quantum advantage. Hopefully, that answers your question.

That was perfect. Let me follow up.

You mentioned dilution refrigeration. That's one area where your competitors, not so much IBM and Google, but competitive methodologies can hammer you guys on.

Can you just talk a little bit about what needs to happen there, and once you're at this quantum advantage, what is the dilution refrigeration cost? Because I get it.

If superconducting is the only technology that can commercialize quantum, who cares about dilution refrigeration costs? If there's others that can and don't have that, could you just kind of hit that?

That'd be great.

Sure. In superconducting quantum computing, we definitely need dilution refrigeration to cool our chips down to get the superconducting effects.

We are talking about cooling our chips down to 10 millikelvin, and dilution refrigeration is a critical technology that enables us to get to those extremely cold temperatures. Dilution refrigeration itself, the technology was invented several decades ago.

It's been around for select military, space-type applications. It's only finding its way in the commercial world now with quantum computing.

It's not like it's a brand-new technology that we are dealing with. It's been around for a while.

There are four or five companies that have entered this area. They make dilution refrigerators that we can get off the shelf.

We have relationships with three of them right now, and we'll continue to discuss their roadmaps and how they plan to improve it. If you look at a superconducting quantum computer, whether it's ours or IBM's or Google's or other companies, a dilution refrigerator looks a little bit like a large kitchen refrigerator, frankly, about 3 feet by 3 feet, maybe 4 feet by 4 feet, and a cylindrical kind of a form factor.

The chip itself is fairly small. Our 108-qubit Cepheus, the 12 9-qubit chiplets, each of the chiplet is about 6 by 6, we're not talking large dimensions for 108-qubit.

Even when we go to several hundred to 1,000-qubit, we are not going to be talking very large dimensions here. You're talking a few centimeters by a few centimeters.

To cool that dimension to 10 millikelvin, the roadmaps that we have seen from commercial companies such as Bluefors or Oxford Instruments or Maybell allow us to get the 1,000-qubit and tens of thousands of qubits in the dilution refrigerator along with the roadmap. We certainly watch developments of those companies very carefully, and we take advantage of their developments as they come along.

It's a complex technology, but it's clearly not a bottleneck for getting superconducting quantum computing to quantum advantage and beyond. We realize that other modalities don't have that issue to deal with dilution refrigerator, but, frankly, when we look at the benefits we get because of superconducting, which are speed and scalability, our speeds are 1,000 to 10,000 times faster than some of those other modalities that operate at room temperature.

That's a huge advantage when it comes to computing, obviously, when you have a 1,000 to 10,000 times speed advantage. Also scalability, because we are dealing with chips, we can scale them up much faster than electromechanical things like trapped-ion or pure atom.

We look at the challenges and opportunities that come with superconducting gate, and, frankly, the challenges with dilution refrigerator are relatively small compared to the benefits we get in terms of scalability and speed.

Got it. Thank you, and keep up the good work.

Thanks, Troy.

Thank you. Hey, guys.

Subodh and Jeff, congrats on getting the Cepheus out on the cloud.

Thanks, John. Then

I just have a question on that one. You're saying later this year, I think, to get to 99.5 from 99.1.

Maybe we can just dig in a little bit there on what needs to happen. Then I just have a quick follow-up.

I know this question is kind of been asked, but maybe can dig in a little bit more.

Sure, John. As we disclosed in our earnings release, right now, the limiting factor for our fidelity, particularly the two-qubit gate fidelity, is our coherence time.

That's the amount of time we can maintain the quantum states in. Right now, it's in the 25 to 30 microsecond range.

We need to roughly double that, ideally triple that to get to the 99.5%-type fidelity. We know exactly where the fidelity is being lost, if you will.

We have several experiments that we are working on. We feel we know what coherence depends on.

We feel pretty good about improving our coherence time and therefore the fidelity as the year goes on. Hopefully, that answers your question.

It does. The lab machine at 99.9, I think it was a lab machine, is that a 9-qubit?

The prototype was even smaller than 9-qubit, but we recently had data that we disclosed with 9-qubit. We are already, with the fast adiabatic CZ scheme, we have reached 9-qubit at very high fidelity now.

We need to get that to 36-qubit next and then the 108-qubit, we'll push on that as fast as we can.

Okay. Then the other question is just on DARPA, any kind of update there?

I think you guys were going to re-engage.

We continue to be part of DARPA, it's not a question of re-engage. We continue to stay engaged with DARPA.

We are part of the QCBA program. They gave us feedback towards the end of last year.

We are working on those things: error correction, the scaling areas, some of the challenges we have. We continue to work on that.

We continue to stay engaged with them. It's an open-ended program.

As we hit certain milestones, they will get us into Phase B and eventually into Phase C and so on. It's a program with seven- to eight-year timeline with milestones-based graduation into the next phase, if you will.

We continue to stay engaged, and we feel confident that, as we continue to improve our performance, we'll get to Phase B and eventually to Phase C and beyond.

You have a full US supply chain, which I'm sure helps. I do one more.

The end of the year, I think we were talking about 150 machine. Should I still think about that 150-qubit machine?

Overall, what we have said is the most important big milestone we have is the quantum advantage, which is roughly three years from now. That's 1,000-qubit at 99.9% two-qubit gate fidelity.

Clearly, we are right now at 108Q at 99.1%. If you go smaller, we are at significantly higher fidelity, but they are smaller.

We need to increase our qubit count roughly by 10x. We need to improve our fidelity from the low 99s to the high 99s.

It's going to be a staircasing situation where there will be times when we increase the qubit count without increasing the fidelity, and there will be times when we increase the fidelity without increasing the qubit count. Ideally, we will do both simultaneously, but sometimes it gets difficult to do that kind of stuff both at the same time.

As this year goes on, definitely expect us to introduce a higher-fidelity 108-qubit. We will be talking about 150 qubits or higher.

We are not quite sure whether we'll be able to include the higher fidelity at the 150-qubit level or not, but, definitely, the goal is to try to increase both qubit count and fidelity.

Okay. It's not easy stuff.

Thank you.

Thanks, John.

Thank you for your interest in Rigetti's earnings call and the thoughtful questions and discussions today. We are encouraged by the progress we are making on our technology roadmap, the growing engagement we are seeing from customers across cloud and on-premises channels, and the strength of our balance sheet to support disciplined execution.

We remain focused on delivering against the milestones we have laid out and on building a business that can create durable long-term value as quantum computing matures. On behalf of the entire Rigetti team, thank you for your continued interest and support, and we look forward to updating you on our progress next quarter.