Maybell Quantum announced ColdCloud®, the world’s first scalable cryogenic cooling platform for efficient quantum computing. ColdCloud delivers more than 10x the energy efficiency of legacy systems, cooldown times measured in hours instead of days, and the modularity and reliability required to take quantum computing from the lab to the datacenter. The first ColdCloud system will be online later this year, with additional deployments expected in 2027.
Where legacy dilution refrigerators bundle all cooling stages into a single standalone unit, ColdCloud centralizes cryogenic cooling power and distributes it to independent, lightweight nodes. Nodes can be configured to reach temperatures below 10 millikelvin for superconducting qubit applications or tuned to higher temperatures for other quantum modalities, sensing, or detector physics. The result is a single, unified platform that replaces rooms filled with standalone refrigerators and the tangle of infrastructure and poor reliability that comes with them.
“Maybell’s mission to build the world’s quantum infrastructure has always been about the ColdCloud,” said Corban Tillemann-Dick, Founder and CEO of Maybell Quantum. “We filed our initial ColdCloud patents within weeks of founding the company, and everything we’ve built since then has been in service of this moment. The dilution refrigerator took quantum computing from impossible to possible. The ColdCloud takes it from possible to practical.”
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Invented in the 1960s as a physics experiment, dilution refrigerators have become an indispensable tool for quantum research. But as currently designed, they cannot provide the performance and continuous uptime that commercial quantum computing demands. Scaling to a million qubits by multiplying traditional pulse tube-based refrigerators would demand thousands of individual systems, megawatts of power, and offer a projected mean time between failures of less than 2 weeks. To deliver on its promise, the quantum industry needs a different approach to cryogenics.
ColdCloud is that approach. By separating the pre-cooling stage from the sub-Kelvin stage and centralizing the former at facility scale, ColdCloud improves thermodynamic efficiency at the4-Kelvin stage by roughly 16x. While the platform is compatible with conventional helium liquefier technology, its reach is dramatically amplified by the invention of the Maybell-cycle, a novel cryogenic cycle that approaches liquefaction efficiency at a scale relevant for research labs, quantum industrials, and on-site quantum computer installations. Where helium liquefiers have historically been confined to industrial gas facilities, the Maybell-cycle captures those same thermodynamic advantages in a compact, easily deployable system. The numbers speak for themselves: 90% less electricity, 90% less cooling water, and up to 80% less Helium-3 per qubit than an equivalent array of legacy dilution refrigerators.
“ColdCloud isn’t one breakthrough. It’s hundreds of engineering problems solved the right way over years of research,” said Tyler Plant, Principal Research Engineer. “That includes our novel cryogenic cycle that brings liquefaction-class efficiency to a quantum lab, and also thermal transport that holds up across a facility, nodes that cool down in hours and operate independently, and dozens of other innovations. From day one, our team refused to accept that yesterday’s cryogenics could support tomorrow’s quantum computers.”
The ColdCloud is modular, flexible, and extraordinarily cost-effective. A ColdCloud with 25 watts of 4K cooling power and ten 10mK nodes with 500uW of 100mK cooling power uses less wall power thana single dilution refrigerator from some competitors, and costs less than $10 million fully deployed. From these smaller Research Scale configurations through to high-uptime Utility Scale systems and Datacenter Scale systems with over a kilowatt of 4K power and more than 1,000 nodes, ColdCloud’s performance and reliability can be tuned to fit each customer’s needs and budget.
“Since we exited stealth, Maybell has set the standard for innovation in ultra-low temperature cryogenics,” said Kyle Thompson, Co-Founder and CTO of Maybell Quantum. “The industry can imitate our form factors and design choices, but they can’t replicate the foundational innovations that make our systems fundamentally more efficient and more reliable.”
Maybell’s ColdCloud architecture is protected by more than 25 patents covering the centralized cooling system, distributed node architecture, thermal transport mechanisms, novel cryogenic cycles, and system control methods.
SOURCE: Maybell