Dozens of materials today outperform the world’s most common superconductor—niobium-titanium (NbTi). But no competing material can beat niobium-titanium’s capacity to be manufactured at scale and rolled out into usable wire.
Two startups say that AI and robots could help close that gap.
The San Francisco–based Periodic Labs and Cambridge, Mass.–based Quantum Formatics are searching for materials that work at temperatures higher than 10 kelvins (−264 °C), the transition temperature of NbTi, below which it loses all electrical resistance.
Quantum Formatics has several candidate materials for a new generation of superconductors. Company founder Jason Gibson says the company is about a year away from making a prototype wire that can be used in qualification tests to demonstrate superconductor performance.
“We’re trying to get operating temperatures of 10 to 20 K,” says Gibson. “We focus on moderate-temperature superconductors with excellent mechanical properties that lead to good manufacturability. This approach means we can adopt a standard wire-manufacturing process.”
Periodic Labs cofounder Ekin Doğuş Çubuk says his company, established in September 2025, has developed a technique based on X-ray diffraction. XRD, as it’s called, is a method of mapping the atomic structure of a material by bouncing X-ray beams off it.
Periodic Labs’ XRD procedures help the company to study candidate superconductors and automate its superconductor discovery process, says Çubuk.
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