Business Bets on a Quantum Leap
Quantum computing could help companies address problems as huge as supply chains and climate change. Here’s how IBM, Google, Microsoft, and others are racing to bring the tech from theory to practice.
It was a marvel of engineering, a harbinger of a future of unimaginable computational power.
It also bore a striking resemblance to a garbage can.
Q System One was a quantum computer. The machine was the culmination of a year—or decades, depending on how one measures—of labor and ingenuity from IBM scientists. The researchers had assembled this stalactite of nested canisters in the recesses of the company’s neo-futuristic research center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. The white, refrigerated contraption dangled from a nine-foot, cubic, aluminum and steel frame. In the innermost chamber: a special processor whose progeny could help solve some of the world’s most intractable science and business problems. This particular generation featured the firepower of 20 quantum bits, or “qubits,” the powerful data units upon which these dream machines operate.
The machine was incredibly impressive, in theory; the qubits were unusually high-quality, and its error rates were relatively low—crucial advantages in the quest to make a quantum computer viable for real-life problem-solving. Granted, the thing was a little underwhelming in person, shielded in that drab receptacle. (At one meeting last November, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty remarked that it looked like a trash can.) But the scientists had a plan to get it ready for its close-up. IBM had hired a boutique London designer to shield the Q System hardware in a shiny, black metallic shell. Already, the entire contraption had been set in an air- and temperature-controlled, borosilicate glass enclosure designed by Goppion, the Milanese firm known for making display cases for the Mona Lisa and the crown jewels at the Tower of London.
By the time IBM unveiled its creation this January, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas—a venue normally reserved for the debuts of flashy consumer gadgetry like virtual-reality headsets and phones with foldable screens—it had a supercomputer that looked super. The press and public ate it up. A “gleaming monolith from a sci-fi blockbuster,” gushed MIT Technology Review. “It looks like a computer from the future,” effused The Verge.
“Everybody takes selfies with the quantum computer,” says Dario Gil, head of IBM’s research division, who calls the technology an “object of fascination.”
Such allure, at the moment, is grounded more in hope than in results. Quantum computers can’t do much of commercial value yet; they’re still inching their way toward usefulness. The technologies that make them so potentially fast and powerful also make them, in their current iterations, unstable and error-prone compared with the so-called classical computers we rely on every day. IBM calls the Q System the “first integrated quantum computing system for commercial use,” but “use,” in this case, is highly abstract: Companies can obtain access, via the Internet, to the quantum platform at IBM’s facilities, running experiments and kicking the tires as they wait for the technology to mature.
Still, recent advances—from Silicon Valley to China, not to mention Yorktown Heights—have convinced much of the corporate world that this technology will soon move off the theoretical wish list. Companies across all industries are hoping to exploit quantum computing to surmount obstacles that have thwarted them for years. Nation-states are mobilizing, too, pouring billions of dollars into research in the hopes of gaining an edge in an area that could someday separate the world’s economic—and military—haves and have-nots.
