ICM HPQC News Flash - June 2026
- Jun 9
- 9 min read
By Matt Gould │ ICM HPQC Fund │ June 2026
“Written by humans, please don’t blame the robots for our typos”
We have been getting inbound enquiries about the recent news from portfolio company Diraq. They have certainly been making headlines. Thank you everybody for your interest – here is our brief attempt to give a sense of just how impactful the news is.
Diraq strikes $53m agreement with US Government – and is eyeing up to $420m more…
Read the full story here.
At the ICM HPQC Fund (HPQC) we have long been solid in our conviction that the only Quantum Computing modality that will deliver a fully commercial quantum computer (one that delivers solutions for less than the cost of the problem it’s solving) is Spins in Silicon (SiMOS). Diraq is on track to build just such a ‘Utility’ quantum computer, with millions, and then billions, of high-quality qubits housed in the equivalent of a single server rack. Diraq make their chips at standard silicon chip manufacturing foundries. Diraq will ship hundreds and then thousands of their quantum computer units, at increasingly lower costs per unit. Diraq’s quantum computers will nestle within standard Nvidia data racks and will be available to anyone who wants to have a quantum computer in their data centre.
Despite the obvious economic advantages SiMOS provides, much of the current hype around quantum computing centres on older modalities such as superconducting qubits, neutral-atom qubits and photonic qubits. In all likelihood these other systems will eventually reach the million-qubit threshold (the level considered minimum for most large-scale commercial problems, and not just toy ‘advantage’ problems). The size, fragility and operational costs of those systems will mean they are few in number and require high operational costs to run – making them intrinsically expensive for the few customers who can buy time on them.
So back to the news of the US Government’s pending investment in Diraq. This is the first time that any of the new SiMOS quantum computing companies like Diraq have reached major mainstream attention. Diraq is the only company in the press release valued at less than $1 billion USD. Most of the older QC companies listed are public or at a later stage (The HPQC fund led Diraq’s Series A-3 round last year at a valuation just north of $200M USD). IBM, one of the companies being invested in alongside Diraq, saw its market cap lift by more than 12%; that’s $27B USD, just on the news that the US Govt was taking a slice of their quantum pie. (Source). This portends well for Diraq’s valuation at their next round – congratulations to all who invested in the HPQC Fund and get to ride that wave with us.
More than the lift in valuations and heady prospects for Diraq, the investment made by the US Govt, informed as it likely was by the work going on in the DARPA Quantum Benchmarking Initiative – see our paper here, is finally bringing the spotlight to the quantum modality we at ICM have been centred on for years. Diraq is not the only SiMOS player in town – the UK has a version called Quantum Motion, and the French also have the amazing team at Quobly. The generation, management and control of single electrons in the wells of silicon chip design features have now firmly been proven at a commercial level. The rest is engineering to scale it all up – and if there is one industry that knows how to scale designs and get them into highly reliable systems fast it is the silicon chip manufacturing ecosystem. Ask Nvidia.
We will continue to track Diraq and the whole sector for you. Watch out for upcoming Investor Insight seminars on Quantum Computing from us. In the meantime if you have questions, or would like access to some of our models and data, feel free to make direct contact.
NVIDIA’s first PC processor, and the squeeze it puts on everyone else
Cue doom-laden bell ringing across the ecosystem for all those who see their future in the design of CPU’s. The N1X bell toll is what most of NVIDIA’s rivals will have dreaded. Let’s dive into it — the company’s first laptop processor since 2011 pairs a 20-core Arm v9.2 CPU (ten Cortex-X925 performance cores, ten Cortex-A725 efficiency cores) with a Blackwell-class integrated GPU of 6,144 CUDA cores — graphics roughly on par with a discrete RTX 5070 — fabricated on TSMC’s 3nm node and co-designed with MediaTek, with up to 128GB of LPDDR5X and the full CUDA software stack alongside. The reveal arrived pre-loaded with design wins: Dell (XPS), Lenovo (Legion and Yoga), Asus (ProArt) and a Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra, with retail slated for the fourth quarter, flagship machines expected above $2,000 and mainstream N1 parts below $1,500. Why does this one little news story warrant such attention by the august journal that is the HPQC Fund Newsflash? Well, from acorns, oaks. Or pebbles avalanches… you get the drift. This is another step toward hegemony. Nvidia, the firm that already owns AI training, is now reaching for the most personal layer of computing — and bringing CUDA, its real moat, down to the laptop.
The prize is large. We mean really large: some 284.7m PCs shipped in 2025, up 8.1% on the year, and the broader processor market NVIDIA is wading into was worth roughly $133bn in 2025, on course to pass $180bn by 2031. The relevant beachhead is the “AI PC”, which Gartner reckons leapt from about 31% of shipments at end-2025 to a projected 54.7% in 2026 — some 143m units, double the prior year. NVIDIA is not chasing the commodity floor of that market; with parts benchmarked against the MacBook Pro it is aiming squarely at the high-margin premium, creator and AI-developer tiers, where a credible local-inference machine commands a fat premium and where, conveniently, its software ecosystem is already entrenched. You know, the sort of screamingly noisy high performance gaming laptops and desktops that your teenager wants while insisting the spec is required to do homework on. That market.
How much NVIDIA can take, and how fast, no idea. Arm-based designs already account for roughly 13% of PC shipments, but that is overwhelmingly Apple’s Mac line (about 9% of all PCs); Qualcomm’s two-year-old Windows-on-Arm effort remains a rounding error. Capture even a tenth of the premium Windows-on-Arm opportunity over the first two product cycles and NVIDIA would book several billion dollars of new annual revenue from a standing start — trivial against a data-centre business now running at an annualised pace north of $200bn, but strategically outsized. The more dramatic number sits next door: one sell-side estimate has NVIDIA’s Grace and Vera server CPUs capturing up to two-thirds of the x86 server-CPU market and roughly $20bn of revenue as AI is sold by the rack rather than the chip — against a server-CPU market AMD itself pegs at over $60bn by 2030. Client and data centre are different battles, but they rest on one thesis: NVIDIA increasingly sells the whole system, and the CPU is the last seat at its own table it had not yet taken.
The losers, should it work, are not hard to name. Intel is the most exposed: it still holds roughly 73% of x86 and leans on OEM-entrenched laptop volume for its base, even as AMD has clawed past 36% of desktop units and Arm chips nibble at the platform. A premium Windows-on-Arm processor with RTX-5070-class graphics attacks precisely the high-end notebook tier where Intel’s margins are richest. AMD, ironic victor of the x86 share war, faces a subtler threat — the N1X’s integrated graphics undercut the discrete-GPU attach and the “big APU” Strix Halo story it has been cultivating. Qualcomm is the most direct casualty, since NVIDIA is targeting the very Windows-on-Arm niche Snapdragon pioneered, but with the performance and CUDA tooling Snapdragon lacks. And Apple, whose M-series defined the efficient-Arm-laptop narrative, now has a Windows-side rival making the identical pitch. The clear winners are Arm Holdings (a royalty on every unit), TSMC (another 3nm customer) and MediaTek (the co-design partner) — and Microsoft, if Windows-on-Arm’s software translation finally grows up. Therein lies the caveat: if x86 emulation stutters or professional apps balk, the N1X will be remembered as brilliant silicon that never found its audience.
Stanford demonstrates a room-temperature quantum light–matter chip
Stanford researchers reported on May 30th a nanoscale optical device that links the quantum properties of light and electrons while operating at room temperature — sidestepping the near-absolute-zero cooling that makes most quantum hardware bulky, power-hungry and expensive. The work uses structured (“twisted”) light and on-chip photonics to maintain the fragile interactions needed for quantum information processing.
If it scales, room-temperature operation would attack one of the dominant cost and engineering constraints across the quantum stack and is particularly interesting where photonic and spin-based modalities intersect. It also feeds the broader silicon-photonics momentum now reshaping both quantum and classical AI interconnect. IF IT SCALES!!! If you want a view of how hard and different using photons for qubits is from standard photonics use cases, let us know. And remember the cooling cost component of photonic quantum computers is a big cost for them (and superconducting, and trapped ions, and, but not so much the laser cooling you need for neutral atoms etc) but not others – e.g. SiMOS (which is at micro not mili Kelvin). One to watch though.
As ever with early-stage physics results, the caveat is the gap between a laboratory demonstration and a manufacturable component — a distinction HPQC's diligence framework weighs carefully when assessing modality risk — Is how we would put it formally. Great team though. Funky result.
Around the Traps: The Latest News from The Sector
Here is a quick-fire list of news. Mostly with the support of Dr Robert Dale at Language Technology (Read His Substack here!)
Big Iron
Dell has added 1,000 customers for its AI Factory server line, bringing total clients to 5,000 in the past quarter. [Bloomberg]
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg indicated a cloud computing business is ‘definitely on the table’ if excess data centre capacity becomes available. That’s a big IF Mark. [TechRadar]
Snowflake has committed to spending US$6B on AWS over five years for AI infrastructure and custom chip services. [GeekWire]
Elon Musk clarified that SpaceX's Colossus 1 data centre lease to Anthropic is 180 days with mutual cancellation rights, not a three-year commitment. [The Next Web]. Shots Fired!
Data centres could increase US electricity costs 6-29% nationally by 2030, with some states facing 57% hikes. [TechRadar]
Hot Chips
ByteDance is developing custom data-centre processors using Arm and RISC-V architectures to reduce reliance on expensive Intel and AMD chips amid US export controls. [The Next Web]
Huawei bets on speed over shrinking transistors to sidestep US chip sanctions. [Yahoo Finance] Who didn’t see that coming?
Micron topped US$1T market value as shares surged 19% on AI chip demand, with UBS tripling its price target to US$1,625. [CNBC] RIDE THAT WAVE!
Nvidia's Jensen Huang disclosed the company will spend approximately US$150B annually in Taiwan, positioning the island as central to AI infrastructure development. [The Next Web]
Qualcomm has agreed to supply ByteDance with millions of AI data-centre chips and help manufacture the Chinese firm's own semiconductor design. [The Next Web]
SK Hynix has crossed a US$1T valuation as AI data centre demand drives memory chip prices higher. [TechRepublic]
Taiwan's prosecutors detained three individuals, including a Super Micro senior vice president, for allegedly smuggling US-restricted Nvidia chips to China via falsified export documents through Japan. [The Next Web] Tut tut….
In case you missed it, read our recent fund communication from HPQC here which includes the latest portfolio update.
Matthew Gould
Portfolio Manager of the ICM HPQC Fund
MAS Licensed Representative, ICM Global Funds Pte Ltd
June 2026
Important Note:
The information in this article should not be considered an offer or solicitation to deal in the ICM HPQC Fund (Registration number T22VC0112B SF003) (the “Sub-fund”). The information is provided on a general basis for informational purposes only and is not to be relied upon as investment, legal, tax, or other advice. It does not take into account the investment objectives, financial situation, or particular needs of any specific investor. Investors should seek relevant professional advice before making any investment decision. The information presented has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, but no representation or warranty is given or may be implied that it is accurate or complete. The Investment Manager reserves the right to amend the information contained herein at any time, without notice. Investments in the Sub-fund are subject to investment risks, including the possible loss of the principal amount invested. All forms of investments carry risks, including the risk of losing all of the invested amount. Investors should read the prospectus before deciding whether to acquire the units in ICM HPQC Fund. The value of investments and the income derived therefrom may fall or rise. Past performance is not indicative of future performance. This document is intended solely for institutional investors and accredited investors as defined under the Securities and Futures Act 2001 of Singapore. The whole or any part of this work may not be reproduced, copied or transmitted or any of its contents disclosed to third parties without ICM Global Fund’s express written consent. This advertisement or publication has not been reviewed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore.
ICM HPQC Fund a registered Sub-Fund of the ICMGF VCC (the VCC), a variable capital company incorporated in the Republic of Singapore. The assets and liabilities of ICM HPQC Fund are segregated from other Sub-Funds of the VCC, in accordance with Section 29 of the VCC Act.
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