SEVEN SYSTEMS AND THEIR MAKERS
The quantum computer supply chain, part by part
Each part of the machine has a different job and a different set of public companies connected to it. Start with the hardware, then inspect the evidence. Quantum-computer makers are listed for their own systems, not as suppliers of the parts inside.
Qubit chips & packaging
The processor is where the qubits live: a silicon or sapphire die patterned with superconducting transmon qubits, made nonlinear by aluminum/aluminum-oxide Josephson junctions, plus tunable couplers and readout resonators, often bump-bonded to a second chip and mounted in a copper package inside magnetic shields at about 10 mK. IBM’s Nighthawk links 120 qubits with 218 tunable couplers, and Google’s Willow has 105 qubits.
18 companiesDilution refrigerator
The dilution refrigerator holds the qubit chip near absolute zero: a pulse tube pre-cools nested copper stages, and in the dilution unit helium-3 crossing into dilute helium-4 absorbs heat at the mixing chamber, around 10 mK. QuantumCTek’s ez-Q F1100, built for thousand-qubit superconducting machines, specifies 8 mK or less and at least 30 µW of cooling power at 20 mK.
7 companiesCryocoolers & helium
A two-stage pulse-tube cryocooler pre-cools the refrigerator to about 3–4 K with no moving parts at its cold end, driven by a water-cooled compressor that circulates helium-4, while a chiller carries the compressor’s heat away. SHI’s RP-222B3S, launched in Sept 2026, delivers 2.0 W at 4.2 K and 55 W at 45 K, and helium is tight: Nippon Sanso raised Japanese helium prices by 30% or more from July 2026 after production suspensions in the Middle East.
10 companiesCryogenic wiring & filters
Hundreds of coaxial lines, or high-density flex cables, carry control and readout signals from room-temperature electronics down to the qubit chip at about 10 mK, each interrupted at every temperature stage by a thermally anchored attenuator or filter so that heat and thermal noise do not ride along. ETH Zurich’s 100-qubit-scale design needs about 60 dB of attenuation on each drive line to leave roughly one thermal photon in a thousand at the chip, and Bluefors’ High-Density Wiring fits up to 1,008 coax lines in one large refrigerator.
10 companiesReadout amplifiers
Reading a superconducting qubit means detecting a microwave pulse of roughly −130 to −120 dBm that has interacted with its readout resonator, so the signal is amplified in stages on its way out: a near-quantum-limited parametric amplifier at the mixing chamber, a HEMT amplifier with about 40 dB of gain on the 4 K plate and low-noise amplifiers at room temperature. Ferrite circulators and isolators let the signal travel up while blocking amplifier noise from travelling back down to the qubits.
3 companiesControl electronics
Room-temperature control electronics turn each quantum program into precisely timed microwave pulses, digitize the qubits’ faint readout signals and feed results back within microseconds. Waveform generators, microwave sources and mixers, FPGA sequencers and digitizers serve every qubit line, and a GPU/CPU host decodes error-correction data in real time; NVIDIA’s NVQLink reference links GPUs to controllers with under 4 microseconds of round-trip latency.
12 companiesVacuum & gas handling
A gas handling system keeps a dilution refrigerator running: turbomolecular pumps backed by oil-free scroll or roots pumps draw helium-3 vapor from the still and send it back, cleaned in a cold trap, through a manifold of valves and gauges, and the same cabinet evacuates the vacuum can. The helium-3/helium-4 mixture is the scarce ingredient: Interlune says today’s refrigerators each use a few dozen liters of helium-3 and estimates U.S. output at about 1 kilogram a year.
9 companiesQuantum computer makers
The companies that design, build or sell complete quantum computers or quantum-computing platforms, in every modality: superconducting circuits like the illustrated machine, trapped ions, neutral atoms, photons, silicon spins and annealers. This group is not a physical part; a maker is listed under a part only when separately documented as making it, such as its own qubit chips. IBM says it has deployed more than 90 quantum systems and signed more than $1.1 billion of client contracts since 2017 (June 2, 2026).
19 companiesCompanies can participate in more than one sector. Sector counts overlap; the quantum-computing universe contains 65 distinct listings.