PsiQuantum, GlobalFoundries Bet Big On Quantum Computing

Quantum computing is in many senses the holy grail of high-performance computing. The technology promises to dramatically accelerate simulations, machine learning, and perhaps most terrifyingly, render modern encryption schemes mute. At least that’s the hope — or fear — depending on how you look at it.

And like the holy grail, making good on these promises remains elusive. While progress is being made in the field, many unsolved challenges remain, according to Peter Shadbolt, chief strategy officer at PsiQuantum.

“We’re at a really exciting time for quantum computing where lots of people have been successful building small systems on handfuls of qubits,” he said, adding that the problem is while these projects have been successful, for them to be commercially viable at scale, they still need error correction. And that will require millions of qubits.

For those that aren’t familiar, qubits are the fundamental building blocks on which quantum computers run. They’re the quantum equivalent of the bits used by conventional computers, but in addition to being represented as a one or a zero, they can also be in a superposition of both. They’re like the Schrodinger’s cat of the computing world.

They’re also really difficult to work with. “The qubits all have an error rate on the order of a fraction of a percent. That’s much, much worse than the transistors in your cell phone,” Shadbolt said. And that’s before you take into account all of the exotic materials and cryogenic temperatures necessary to make them work, he added.