Google’s cloud biz gets quantum push
For years, Google has poured time and money into one of the most ambitious dreams of modern technology: Building a working quantum computer. Now the company is thinking of ways to turn the project into a business.
Alphabet’s Google has offered science labs and artificial intelligence researchers early access to its quantum machines over the internet in recent months. The goal is to spur development of tools and applications for the technology, and ultimately turn it into a faster, more powerful cloudcomputing service, according to people pitched on the plan.
A Google presentation slide details the company’s quantum hardware, including a new lab it calls an "Embryonic quantum data center." Another slide on the software displays information about ProjectQ, an opensource effort to get developers to write code for quantum computers.
"They’re pretty open that they’re building quantum hardware and they would, at some point in the future, make it a cloud service," said Peter McMahon, a quantum computing researcher at Stanford University. These systems push the boundaries of how atoms and other tiny particles work to solve problems that traditional computers can’t handle. The technology is still emerging from a long research phase, and its capabilities are hotly debated. Still, Google’s nascent efforts to commercialise it, and similar steps by International Business Machines, are opening a new phase of competition in the fastgrowing cloud market.
Jonathan DuBois, a scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said Google staff have been clear about plans to open up the quantum machinery through its cloud service and have pledged that government and academic researchers would get free access.
Providing early and free access to specialised hardware to ignite interest fits with Google’s long-term strategy to expand its cloud business. In May, the company introduced a chip, called Cloud TPU, that it will rent out to cloud customers as a paid service. In addition, a select number of academic researchers are getting access to the chips at no cost.
While traditional computers process bits of information as 1s or zeros, quantum machines rely on "qubits" that can be a 1, a zero, or a state somewhere in between at any moment.