Amazon.com’s cloud unit has built its first quantum-computing chip, joining a growing roster of technology companies showing off futuristic hardware.
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Alphabet’s Google and Microsoft in the last two months have announced their own quantum hardware, suggesting that the powerful form of computing – currently relegated to science experiments – may solve real problems in the coming years. Others said useful quantum computers, which might enable advances in chemistry or healthcare, were more than a decade away.
Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) new Ocelot chip, developed by a team working at the California Institute of Technology, comprises two tiny squares of silicon stacked on top of each other. The name is a play on words, referring to oscillators, which generate periodic electric signals, including in the prototype hardware Amazon developed.
“Five years ago, I could have told you, ‘I think I could build a quantum computer and could build it practically,’” said Oskar Painter, head of quantum hardware at AWS. “Today I can say with confidence we are going to build a quantum computer.”
Bits, the foundational units of computing, store information represented by a one or a zero. Quantum computers use quantum bits, or qubits, which reflect the probability of a one or a zero and can appear as both simultaneously. That makes quantum computers able to consider more possibilities exponentially faster than a traditional computer.
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