AWS and QuEra lay out roadmap to fault-tolerant quantum computing in next two years
Amazon Web Services Inc. has long been at the forefront of a host of companies racing to transform quantum computing from a theory to reality, and it believes it’s finally on course to make that happen thanks to a newly established partnership with QuEra Computing Inc.
The partners are working together to bring the world’s first fault-tolerant quantum computers to the AWS cloud within the next two years. By 2028, AWS promised today, it will make it possible for researchers to tackle some of the world’s most complex scientific problems using quantum machines with unprecedented computing power.
QuEra is a U.S. quantum computing startup founded in 2018 by researchers from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It specializes in an approach known as “neural atom” quantum computing, which leverages Rydberg atoms to accelerate quantum calculations. Rydberg atoms are “excited” atoms that have one or more electrons in a highly charged state and are characterized by a very high principal quantum number, which means they can interact strongly with electric and magnetic fields.
This is a key detail because the No. 1 problem with quantum computing is fault tolerance. The “qubits,” which are akin to the “bits” in traditional computers, are notoriously unstable because of the way they’re so sensitive to any force that interacts with them. Something such as the vibration of a needle falling onto the floor, or the fluctuations of the Earth’s magnetic field, is enough to throw them off, resulting in errors in a quantum computer’s calculations. Solving this challenge is critical to building working quantum machines.
