Tiptoe before quantum leap into the future

● At its annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas this week, Amazon Web Services announced its entry into the quantum computing market, promising affordable access to an emerging world of ultrahigh-speed processors.

Only a handful of companies have developed quantum computers, which remain prohibitively expensive to use, and therefore almost impossible to test or to gain experience on. Now, the new Amazon Braket service will allow customers to explore, evaluate, and experiment with quantum computing hardware as they prepare for wider availability.

AWS has established a Centre for Quantum Computing to accelerate the development of technologies and applications for these computers, along with an Amazon Quantum Solutions Lab to connect customers with experts.

“Quantum computing has the chance to solve a lot of problems for customers that traditional computing approaches can’t yet,” AWS vice-president for product marketing Brian Hall told Business Times during re:Invent. “But it’s very early days. We say at Amazon on a lot of things that it’s Day 1. In quantum computing, it’s somewhere between Day 0 and 1.”

Examples of applications of quantum computing include the modelling of complex molecules for new pharmaceutical drugs, and financial services companies creating models from thousands of variables that would take current computers years to calculate.

“The main reason we launched Braket was because customers have been asking for something like this. In particular, they look to us to help address all the data that they’re collecting, how they can run analytics on it, how they can use machine learning to get better insights into their business, and make better decisions. We’ve had enough conversations with customers showing that there’s interest in the technology that we felt it was time to announce what we’re doing here.”