Engineers build world's first portable diamond-powered quantum computer — it works at room temperature and can be plugged into an outlet

A close up of someone's hand holding a small electronic circuit chip with the letter S on it in the middle.

A German startup has debuted the world's first diamond-based quantum computing system to exceed 10 qubits.

The machine, built by engineers at Saxon Q, is a nitrogen-vacancy (NV) quantum computer, meaning it uses defects in synthetic diamonds as quantum bits (qubits) to perform quantum operations. Qubits can be manipulated to represent the 0s and 1s of data, as well as quantum states that are superpositions of both the 0s and the 1s.