A brand new quantum pc startup born from researchers at Harvard College and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) known as QuEra Computing stated on Wednesday it raised $17 million from traders, together with Japanese e-commerce large Rakuten Inc.
It is the newest quantum pc {hardware} maker to return out of the lab at a time when funding for the nascent know-how is booming.
Whereas there are numerous applied sciences for creating so-called quantum bits or qubits the place the computations occur, QuEra’s qubits use impartial atoms in a vacuum chamber and use lasers to chill and management them.
“From 2015 after we had an empty lab with nothing to 2017, the work that we had been doing at Harvard and MIT, we had been already on the stage the place we may management 51 of those impartial atom qubits,” stated Alex Keesling, QuEra CEO and co-inventor of the know-how. He stated this know-how was straightforward to scale up and that QuEra would have a 1000-qubit pc in two years. Right now it has a 256-qubit machine, he stated.
Worldwide Enterprise Machines Corp, whose quantum computer systems are already obtainable by the cloud, is aiming for a 1000-plus qubit machine in 2023 https://analysis.ibm.com/weblog/ibm-quantum-roadmap. Though it is exhausting to check the efficiency of the totally different machines simply based mostly on the variety of qubits, say a number of researchers of quantum computer systems.
For these seeking to check out the QuEra machine, Keesling stated the aim is to make it obtainable by the cloud by the third quarter of subsequent yr.
Whereas there may be some debate about when quantum computer systems will be capable of crack real-world issues, researchers imagine quantum computer systems may function thousands and thousands of occasions sooner than as we speak’s superior supercomputers, probably making doable duties comparable to mapping complicated molecular buildings and chemical reactions to boosting the ability of synthetic intelligence.
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