A few yards from the stockpile of La Croix in the warehouse space behind startup Rigetti Computing’s offices in Fremont, California, sits a machine like a steampunk illustration made real. Its steel chambers are studded with bolts, handles, and circular ports. But this monster is powered by electricity, not coal, and evaporates aluminum, not water—it makes superconducting electronics. Rigetti is using the machine and millions of dollars’ worth of other equipment housed here in hermetically sealed glass lab spaces to try and build a new kind of super-powerful computer that runs on quantum physics.

It’s hardly alone in such an undertaking, though it is the underdog: Rigetti is racing against similar projects at Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Intel. Every Bay Area startup will tell you it is doing something momentously difficult, but Rigetti is biting off more than most -- it's working on quantum computing. All venture-backed startups face the challenge of building a business, but this one has to do it by making progress on one of tech's thorniest problems.

An 8-qubit quantum processor built by Rigetti Computing. RIGETTI COMPUTING

Rigetti, which has 80 employees, has raised nearly $70 million to develop quantum computers, which by encoding data into the physics apparent only at tiny scales should offer a, well, quantum leap in computing power. “This is going to be a very large industry---every major organization in the world will have to have a strategy for how to use this technology,” says Chad Rigetti, the company’s founder. The strapping 38-year-old physics PhD worked on quantum hardware at Yale and IBM before founding his own company in 2013 and taking it through the Y Combinator incubator better known for software startups like Dropbox.

No company is yet very close to offering up a quantum computer ready to do useful work existing computers can't. But Google has pledged to commercialize the technology within five years. IBM offers a cloud platform intended as a warmup for a future commercial service that lets developers and researchers play with a prototype chip located in Big Blue’s labs. After a few years of mostly staying quiet, Rigetti is now entering the fray. The company on Tuesday launched its own cloud platform, called Forest, where developers can write code for simulated quantum computers, and some partners get to access the startup's existing quantum hardware. Rigetti gave WIRED a peek at the new manufacturing facility in Fremont—grandly dubbed Fab-1—that just started making chips for testing at the company's headquarters in Berkeley.