Could a niche 80s technology be the key to better quantum computers?

There’s a lot I love about the 1980s, from the new wave of British heavy metal to the rich purple blush favored by makeup artists of the time. But among all the hair, noise and glamour, there were some ignored superstars: superconducting circuits. In 1980, the computer giant IBM bet on this technology to build computers that would be so efficient as to be revolutionary. In May of the same year, the popular science magazine Scientific American even put a superconducting circuit on the cover.

But the revolution never came. Superconducting computer chips seemed to have gone the way of perms and attached pants. Still, one company kept the research alive. I recently visited the headquarters of SEEQC, and the company’s quantum chip foundry in upstate New York, which arose in part from IBM’s shuttered superconducting computing program. There I learned about the company’s hope that superconducting chips will play a hand in a new technological revolution—this time with quantum computers.

Inside SEEQC’s manufacturing facility, I am surrounded by large machines and technicians in full-body protective suits. In some of these clean rooms, ultra-thin layers of the superconducting metal niobium are repeatedly and carefully deposited on layers of dielectric materials, creating a delicate sandwich-like structure. In others, lithography devices use light to write intricate circuits on these structures, and every tiny trench and groove becomes important to the quantum processes that make them work. The whole floor buzzes with noise and everything basks in yellow light which, I’m told, interferes with the chip-making process less than other colors. As we talk in an adjacent conference room, SEEQC CEO John Levy hands me a version of the company’s superconducting chip, and I’m struck by how unassumingly small and square it is for a device that aims to change an already futuristic industry.

We have to solve the problem

Superconductors transmit electricity with perfect efficiency, making them markedly different from any material we normally use for electronics. When you plug in your phone to charge, the cord or charger often gets hot, reducing the energy that was intended for the phone. This happens to such an extent that computer scientist Michael Frank wrote in 2017: “A conventional computer is essentially an expensive electric heater that happens to perform a small amount of computation as a side effect.”

A computer with superconducting components would not have this problem. But there’s a catch: All known superconductors must either be kept extremely cold or put under extreme pressure to function. This means that a superconducting computer must always be kept at just a few degrees above absolute zero. Historically, this proved too costly and impractical. IBM ended its research efforts on superconducting computing in 1983. Heat-spewing conventional computers won out, and somewhat ironically, the energy costs of computing have only increased, and are skyrocketing today, largely due to the AI ​​boom.

However, super leaders found themselves back in the spotlight a few decades later. In 1999, a team of researchers in Japan created the first superconducting quantum bit, or qubit, which is the most basic building block of a quantum computer. This was a fundamentally different proposal than what researchers had attempted a decade earlier. Instead of replicating ordinary computing with superconducting materials, they opened the door to an entirely new kind of computing, with devices that process information through mechanisms that simply do not exist in any conventional computer.

Quantum computing has come a long way since then, and superconducting qubits played a role in that progress. Google and IBM use them to power some of today’s most powerful quantum computers, and these devices have begun to tackle scientifically interesting problems with encouraging success. Some demonstrations of “quantum superiority” over classical computers stand unchallenged, underpinning the promise that these machines are fundamentally different from any previously built computer.

At the same time, quantum computers have yet to live up to their disruptive promises: they haven’t broken widely used encryption, discovered new wonder drugs, or revolutionized industrial chemistry, just to name a few. The road to doing any of these things is still full of technical challenges and technical obstacles.

Could some of the answer lie all the way back in the 1980s? Levy certainly means it. He says his team is building digital superconducting chips that could allow quantum computers to become bigger, more powerful and more fail-proof all at once. Down the hall from us, scientists are testing chips in all kinds of tubular refrigerators, as he tells me that they aim to not just make one more tool, or one more component, but to take the place of many components that currently make quantum computers bulky and inefficient.

At its core, a superconducting quantum computer consists of a chip filled with superconducting quantum bits and a refrigerator where the chip must be kept in order to function. Looking from the outside, you can see a smooth rectangular box, usually as tall as a person. But there is more. Qubits must be controlled and monitored, information must be fed into them from a conventional computer, and the results of their calculations must be read out by one as well. Qubits are also fragile and error-prone, so they must run error-correction algorithms, which require sophisticated controllers that monitor and adjust many qubits simultaneously in real time. So the non-quantum components of a quantum computer are remarkably important to its function – and these take up a lot of space and use a lot of energy. Behind each tall refrigerator that houses qubits, there are usually several other equally tall cabinets filled with racks of energy-wasting conventional devices. And there are countless cables connecting the quantum and non-quantum parts of the computer.

Adding more qubits, which you need to do to make a computer more powerful, requires even more cables. “Physically, you can’t just keep adding cables forever,” says Shu-Jen Han, chief technical officer at SEEQC. Not only does space in the fridge become a problem, but each cable brings some heat, which then interferes with the qubits and destroys performance. How qubits are connected, controlled, wired and packaged may seem like a tough facet of the technology that only engineers and experts should worry about, but it has become one of the issues preventing quantum computers from further maturing.

The SEEQC chip I was holding could pick up a lot of this.

It looks exactly like you’d imagine a computer chip – small and flat, with a metallic rectangle on top of a slightly larger one. Levy explains that the small rectangle contains the superconducting qubits, while the larger one is a conventional computer chip made of superconducting materials that can digitally control these qubits. Because they are both superconducting, they can be placed in the same refrigerator, eliminating the need for many of the room-temperature devices that quantum computers currently rely on.

Not introducing extra heat into the fridge is a clear advantage, but the superconducting control chip is also much less power-intensive. SEEQC estimates that it could achieve a billion-fold improvement in a quantum computer’s energy efficiency. Estimates from the Quantum Energy Initiative indicate that some designs for large, fail-safe quantum computers will require more energy than existing conventional supercomputers—those behemoths that fill entire rooms—and much of this energy consumption can be attributed to classical computer components.

Because the two chips—the quantum one that calculates and the classical one that controls it—can be close together, there are fewer delays in transmitting instructions to the qubits and how their calculations are both read out and corrected for errors. Levy also told me that because the chip’s signals are digital, the qubits it controls should also have less “crosstalk,” or unintended interactions that make them more error-prone.

In 2025, I spoke with David DiVincenzo, who nearly 20 years ago proposed seven conditions for constructing a working quantum computer that scientists are still following. He told me that when he envisions a useful and powerful quantum computer, it’s a million-qubit device that could encompass entire rooms filled with machinery, more akin to particle colliders than a laptop or a rack in a data center. The team at SEEQC is working to avoid this oversized future. For the computer fans out there, think Mac not ENIAC.

The team at SEEQC is currently testing their chips in various configurations and with qubits made both by their own researchers and those from other quantum computer manufacturers. Levy says early tests show good performance across the board, which speaks to the chip’s versatility. At the same time, all tests have been limited to a small number of qubits, typically fewer than 10, which are several orders of magnitude smaller than the future practical quantum computers the company hopes to enable.

Physics issues also arise – superconductors have a propensity to become filled with tiny quantum vortices when there is a magnetic field nearby, such as those used to tune some qubits. Oleg Mukhanov, SEEQC’s chief science officer, told me about the method the firm innovated to deal with this problem, where eddies are swept away by another electromagnetic field. In short, I was transported to my time in graduate school and sat in classes on superconductor physics—even the most futuristic technologies cannot escape the vagaries of fundamental quantum effects.

Could the superconducting circuits rise up and send me back even further? The time may have come for the 80s to make a comeback in the quantum world, although I hope we put the shoulder pads behind us.