BTQ stock soars after $15M quantum chip deal with Korean leader ICTK

Investing.com -- BTQ Technologies Corp. (NASDAQ:BTQ) stock surged 7.6% in premarket trading Monday after the quantum technology company announced a $15 million strategic investment and development agreement with Korea’s leading secure element chip manufacturer ICTK (KOSDAQ:456010).

The partnership aims to co-develop a quantum-secure secure element chip called Quantum Compute in Memory (QCIM), which will integrate BTQ’s cryptographic acceleration and post-quantum cryptography at the silicon level. The agreement includes both a development component for joint design through certification and BTQ’s equity investment in ICTK, with the Korean firm providing in-kind cost sharing and preferential manufacturing capacity.

The QCIM chip is being designed for high-assurance applications including digital asset wallets, mobile authentication, IoT endpoints, payment systems, and defense networks. Early performance targets include up to five times faster Advanced Encryption Standard throughput compared to leading secure hardware and approximately one million digital signatures per second.

"This agreement puts quantum-safe security at the center of the global silicon ecosystem," said Olivier Roussy Newton, CEO of BTQ. "By combining BTQ’s QCIM platform, powered by our CASH acceleration, with ICTK’s secure-element expertise, we give hardware makers a clear path to embed post-quantum protection at scale."

The partnership complements Korea’s recently announced Quantum Defense Strategy, which prioritizes rapid deployment of quantum-secure technologies across critical infrastructure, defense and financial systems. As Korea’s leading secure-element vendor, ICTK’s involvement provides third-party validation and a path to commercial scale.

The companies will pursue mass production, testing, and engagement with international standards bodies like ITU and ISO to achieve certification and deployment across telecom and financial networks. Early customer engagements are already underway with potential integrators evaluating the PQC-enabled secure chips for upcoming products.

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