What do the largest company in the world, Nvidia, our home-grown millionaires’ factory Macquarie Group and the country’s leading venture capitalist, Blackbird, have in common with the federal and Queensland governments?

You could be forgiven if your riposte was zilch. But if you answer PsiQuantum at the pub trivia night, the meat tray is yours.

PsiQuantum co-founder and chief technologist Mark Thompson holds a model of a quantum chip.

So it would be unsurprising that both governments must be doing cartwheels after their combined near $1 billion investment in the US quantum computing start-up doubled in value overnight when a bunch of new investors including Macquarie and Nvidia joined the list of investors.

The updated valuation for the whole of PsiQuantum, which is trying to build a new form of computer capable of solving previously impenetrable problems, is now around $10.6 billion.

The very notion of the federal and Queensland governments being ahead of Nvidia or Macquarie at picking an IT winner feels both bizarre........

© The Sydney Morning Herald