Aurora consists of four photonically interconnected modular and independent server racks, containing 35 photonic chips and 13km of fiber optics. The system operates at room temperature and is fully automated, which Xanadu says makes it capable of running “for hours without any human intervention.”

The company added that in principle, Aurora could be scaled up to “thousands of server racks and millions of qubits today, realizing the ultimate goal of a quantum data center.” In a blog post detailing Aurora, Xanadu CTO Zachary Vernon said the machine represents the “very first time [Xanadu] – or anyone else for that matter – have combined all the subsystems necessary to implement universal and fault-tolerant quantum computation in a photonic architecture.”