The chip, cooked up with UC Santa Barbara, is supposed to make quantum processors talk to each other over fibre. No magic cable nonsense. It allegedly consumes less than one megawatt of power, which Cisco thinks makes it special, although that’s not exactly groundbreaking for a prototype.

Cisco says the chip is “ready for scalable deployment,” which probably means they got it to entangle something once on a Thursday afternoon in lab conditions.

To show it’s serious, Cisco has opened Cisco Quantum Labs. There, researchers will tinker with entanglement-distribution protocols, build a compiler for quantum spaghetti and slap together a Quantum Network Development Kit for devs who don’t mind everything breaking if someone sneezes.

According to the company, the goal is to build infrastructure that “bridges classical and quantum networks.” That bridge is being built by half the industry already, but Cisco clearly wanted a photo op.

Entangling qubits over fibre without turning them into noise is tricky. It involves keeping coherence intact while juggling timing, photons and bad telecoms hardware. Cisco thinks its chip can pull it off using standard kit, which if true, would make it actually useful.

There’s no shipping date, no kit using it, and no hint of pricing. But Cisco says it’s working with standards groups and “early adopters,” so this one looks like it’ll stew in the lab for a while yet.