Just two years removed from the AI explosion, are we on the verge of another computing revolution?
Microsoft’s new Majorana 1 chip, announced Feb. 19, could provide the jumping off point for a quantum leap. The chip utilizes Majorana particles—particles that are cooled to exist in a state of having no charge—through its topological superconductor, a world-first technological breakthrough that could accelerate the quantum computing timeline.
Genesis. In a blog post announcing the breakthrough, Microsoft said that the chip technology offers “a path to developing quantum systems that can scale to a million qubits.” That would put meaningful applications of quantum computing years rather than decades away.. Chetan Nayak, a Microsoft technical fellow focused on quantum science, told IT Brew that the chip is part of hardware building blocks for the future.
“It’s not yet a million qubit chip, but the qubits are small enough, and the overall architecture is flexible enough, that it has the right properties that we see in that line of sight,” Nayak said.
Double identity. The breakthrough isn’t the only big news in quantum computing this month. On Feb. 11, quantum technology firms QphoX, Rigetti, and Qblox published research indicating that microwave-to-optical transduction could be used to connect optical fibers to superconducting qubits via the necessary microwave signals. It’s all very technical, but, as Rigetti CEO Subodh Kulkarni explained, the bottom line is that the potential is there for this approach to make a difference.
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“We have not only closed the gap, but we may have gone a little bit ahead of other modalities, and our historic strength, scalability, and gauge speeds continue,” Kulkarni told IT Brew. “So, we really feel very confident about where we are in the trajectory of growth with superconducting quantum computing.”
Leap home. It’s impossible to predict the future, and with advances in quantum computing coming this fast, who knows where we’ll be in another five years. But Johannes Ullrich, dean of research at the SANS Technology Institute, told IT Brew that the demand for quantum-capable hardware may not be the primary driver of the quantum computing revolution. Rather, developments in cloud computing could provide a more pragmatic roadmap
Transforming existing data centers into quantum data centers will require massive technological advancements, along with significant infrastructure overhauls. Ullrich believes it will simply be easier to pay someone else to handle the infrastructure obstacles.
“I think quantum will stay a cloud technology,” Ullrich said. “Essentially, companies are less likely to have an on-premise quantum computer, but they’re going to buy cloud quantum resources.”