BTQ Technologies Opens NYC Hub for Quantum-Secure Silicon
BTQ Technologies announced the opening of a new hub in New York City focused on developing quantum-secure silicon. The company is reportedly hiring former Apple talent for the initiative. The effort is aimed at creating future-proof hardware security solutions, relevant to the long-term development of secure system-on-a-chip (SoC) architectures.
The New York City hub, located in the Flatiron District, is specifically designed to accelerate BTQ's Quantum Compute in Memory (QCIM) program. This initiative focuses on developing specialized silicon to run cryptographic calculations closer to where data is stored, aiming to boost performance and energy efficiency for post-quantum algorithms. Leading the NYC office are Head of Silicon Product Sean Hackett and Head of Hardware Zach Belateche, both Stanford graduates and the primary authors of BTQ's QCIM-related patent portfolio. They are joined by former Intel hardware security expert Anne Reinders, who serves as BTQ's Head of Cryptography. One of the key hires is Fabien Goncalves, a former engineering lead from Apple's elite Special Projects Group. At Apple, Goncalves was instrumental in developing safety-critical, low-latency embedded systems and advanced hardware, bringing deep expertise in system architecture and board-level integration to BTQ's team. The engineering team has been significantly expanded with talent from Meta, PsiQuantum, Samsung, SandboxAQ, and Texas Instruments. This diverse expertise in quantum control systems, advanced silicon design, and semiconductor manufacturing is intended to drastically shorten the timeline from architectural design to commercial-ready, validated silicon. This expansion builds on a 2026 collaboration with the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), a major applied research organization. The partnership with ITRI is crucial for validating the QCIM chip architecture, enabling rapid prototyping, testing, and system-level integration for future government and enterprise clients. The core threat BTQ aims to neutralize is "harvest now, decrypt later," where adversaries collect encrypted data today to break it with future quantum computers. Experts predict quantum computers capable of breaking current encryption standards could emerge before 2030, making hardware-level post-quantum cryptography (PQC) a critical area of development. BTQ has also been active in applying PQC to blockchain, demonstrating a quantum-resistant version of Bitcoin Core that replaces the vulnerable ECDSA algorithm with the NIST-approved ML-DSA standard. In late 2025, the company also invested in South Korean security firm Keypair to co-develop hardware-rooted PQC for critical national infrastructure.
