Amazon enters quantum computer race

Amazon lays the foundation stone for its quantum computer. Or rather, the first qubit, named after the quantum information storage unit; a term that will take some getting used to. For this, the American is opening its AWS Center for Quantum Computing this week. In order to shorten the link between fundamental research and commercial applications as much as possible, this center takes place on 2,000 square meters in the heart of Caltech, the prestigious Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.

Amazon announced this project in 2019, the same year it launched its Amazon Braket program, a quantum computing offer in the cloud, offered by three partner start-ups (D-Wave Systems, IonQ and Rigetti Computing) and intended for scientists. The center is headed by Caltech physicist Oskar Painter. The work will rely on developers from AWS, researchers from Caltech and other institutions such as the University of Washington, Stanford, MIT, and Harvard.

The aura of pioneer Richard Feynman

"Our center is based on campus because it allows us to interact with students and faculty from major physics and engineering research groups, which are located a few buildings away from us," Nadia Carlsten said in a statement. Product Manager at the AWS Center for Quantum Computing. Caltech is also Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize in Physics 1965 for his fundamental work on quantum electrodynamics. He is reputed to be a quantum computing pioneer since 1981.

Read also:

Paris and Saclay become strongholds of quantum research

Quantum computer: Pasqal's bet

If AWS (Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing branch of Amazon) is so close to academic research, it is because the discipline is still in its infancy. To be trivial, the famous "blue screens" of Windows 95 were nothing compared to the numerous miscalculations of quantum computers. "Qubits make about one error every hundred operations", Théau Perronin, founder of the French start-up Alice & Bob, who is building his own computer, recently explained to "Echos".

The holy grail of low error rate

“The ultimate measure of the quality of our qubits will be the error rate,” Amazon announces. This will be the sinews of war so that these machines expected to revolutionize science and industry have concrete applications. Three main technologies are competing for the market at the moment: superconductors (used by Amazon, IBM or Google), trapped ions (on which the start-ups Honeywell or IonQ are betting) and photons (used by the Chinese Jiuzhang). In any case, the quantum state remains fragile and errors numerous.

Read also:

Quantum computer: five questions to (finally) understand everything

The primer of quantum

To reduce the error rate, AWS relies on a hybrid approach, combining the hardware level (with redundant qubits) and the “logical” level (a software layer encoding quantum information and able to detect and correct errors).

One thing is certain, once Amazon makes its new computing capabilities available, it will be done through the cloud. “With quantum, we are going back to the beginnings of computing with very imposing machines”, compares Théau Perronin, of the start-up Alice & Bob. In other words, it is impossible to install such factories at the customer's premises.

With nearly two-thirds of the global cloud market in 2021 (according to Synergy Research Group), ahead of Microsoft Azure (20%) and Google Cloud (9%), AWS is well placed. For Théau Perronin, Amazon “understood that in this infancy phase, the one who controls the value chain is the one who controls the hardware”. What made the success of Amazon's cloud, behind the software interface, are its servers. With quantum, Amazon may not be starting from scratch. Let's say somewhere between zero and one.