Happy Tuesday!

This marks the first edition since Emily moved on to other projects, and Fynn took over writing this newsletter together with Benjamin.

We reworked the newsletter format to make it easier to digest while keeping the mission the same: bringing you the latest news, deep dives, curated headlines, funding updates, and geopolitical context — now every Tuesday.

Here’s what to expect in this week’s newsletter:

Austin-based startup Neurophos has closed an impressive $110M Series A funding round to advance the development of its next-generation photonics processors. The round was led by Gates Frontier, Bill Gates' venture capital firm, and included prominent names like Microsoft's M12 and Bosch Ventures.

The core innovation is a "metasurface modulator" that functions as an optical processing unit (OPU).

According to the company, these metamaterial-based components are about 10,000 times smaller than traditional optical transistors, enabling massive parallel processing directly in the optical domain. "We have de-risked the fundamental physics," said CEO Patrick Bowen.

Neurophos claims its OPU can achieve up to a 50x advantage over Nvidia's current Blackwell architecture in both energy efficiency and speed by the time its first chips will hit the market in mid-2028, positioning itself as a key player in the race for energy-efficient computing.

Driven by the AI industry's insatiable demand for High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM), the memory chip market is heading for a massive shortage.

A recent Wall Street Journal article paints the picture: costs are set to rise across everything from smartphones to cars, as up to 70 percent of memory chips will be absorbed by data centers in 2026.

This demand shock was exacerbated by aggressive maneuvers from industry giants. Last October, OpenAI reportedly struck deals with Samsung and SK Hynix to secure up to 40% of the global DRAM supply for its “Stargate” AI infrastructure project, which caused a frenzy among competitors.

The fallout was immediate, forcing competitors to scramble and reportedly leading to the dismissal of Google’s head of procurement. Now, the automotive industry, increasingly reliant on memory for infotainment and driver-assistance systems, could face production disruptions as early as next quarter, according to a warning from UBS.

Adding geopolitical tension to the supply squeeze, the U.S. government has threatened South Korean manufacturers with 100% tariffs if they do not increase their efforts to build production capacity within the United States.

This combination of exploding demand, strategic supply hoarding, and political pressure is creating a memory super-cycle, and memory prices may stay inflated until 2027, as per Yole.

In one of the largest consolidation moves in the quantum computing sector to date, D-Wave has completed its acquisition of Quantum Circuits Inc. (QCI) for $550 million, making it the first company in the world to develop and offer both quantum annealing and universal gate-model systems.

Through the acquisition, D-Wave integrates QCI's innovative "dual-rail qubit" technology. These qubits promise to overcome one of the biggest hurdles on the path to fault-tolerant quantum computing: quantum error correction.

QCI's architecture aims to combine the speed of superconducting systems with the high fidelity of ion trap approaches, enabling more hardware-efficient error correction. D-Wave plans to release an initial gate-model system based on this technology as early as 2026.

For customers, this widens the use cases: Annealing already handles industrial optimization, while gate-model systems open the door to tougher problems in materials science and pharmaceuticals.

SQLank Spin Out at $400M valuation

TSMC Q4 2025: Record $33.7B quarterly revenue, up 25.5% year-over-year

Intel Stock down despite beating expectations

EpochAI has updated its Frontier Data Center Report, a great source to understand the current build-out

Europe starts €50M Quantum Pilot

Alice & Bob Achieves 10,000x Lower Error Rate with “Elevator Codes”

Microsoft Launches $200K Quantum Research Program

Last week saw a wave of large funding rounds across AI infrastructure, photonics, and cloud.

After a period of private-market growth, the quantum computing industry appears to be entering a new phase of maturity, with several leading startups preparing to go public in 2026.

The most anticipated debut is that of Quantinuum, Honeywell’s majority-owned subsidiary. The company confidentially filed for an IPO in mid-January. With an estimated valuation of over $20 billion, the offering could raise around $1 billion, making it one of the largest and most significant traditional IPOs in the sector's history.

Joining the pipeline is SEEQC, a developer of superconducting quantum chips, which announced a definitive merger agreement with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), Allegro Merger Corp. The deal values the company at approximately $1 billion.

Furthermore, photonics quantum computing firm Xanadu has announced plans to go public in late 2026, adding another technology to the mix of publicly traded quantum companies.

In these developments, the specific IPO route matters. Quantinuum’s traditional filing demands real financial scrutiny and signals genuine market readiness. SEEQC’s SPAC, on the other hand, looks more like an already familiar pattern: private investors seeking liquidity after years of holding. For the quantum sector, these offerings are a credibility test: their performance will shape how mainstream capital views the industry going forward.