Google’s quantum leap starts new battle in the cloud
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 cloud-computing service, according to people pitched on the plan.
A Google presentation slide, obtained by Bloomberg News, 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 open-source 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.
A Google spokesman declined to comment.
Providing early and free access to specialised hardware to ignite interest fits with Google’s longterm 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 one, a zero, or a state somewhere in between at any moment. It’s still unclear whether this works better than existing supercomputers. And the technology doesn’t support commercial activity yet.
Still, Google and a growing number of other companies think it will transform computing by processing some important tasks millions of times faster. SoftBank Group’s giant new Vision fund is scouting for investments in this area, and IBM and Microsoft have been working on it for years, along
[Google is] pretty open that they’re building quantum hardware and they would, at some point in the future, make it a cloud service Peter McMahon, quantum computing researcher at Stanford University
with startup D-Wave Systems.
In 2014, Google unveiled an effort to develop its own quantum computers. Earlier this year, it said the system would prove its “supremacy” — a theoretical test to perform on par, or better than, existing supercomputers — by the end of 2017. One of the presentation slides viewed by Bloomberg repeated this prediction.
Quantum computers are bulky beasts that require special care, such as deep refrigeration, so they’re more likely to be rented over the Internet than bought and put in companies’ own data centers. If the machines end up being considerably faster, that would be a major competitive advantage for a cloud service. Google rents storage by the minute. In theory, quantum machines would trim computing times drastically, giving a cloud service a huge effective price cut. Google’s cloud offerings currently trail those of Amazon.com and Microsoft.
Earlier this year, IBM’s cloud business began offering access to quantum computers. In May, it added a 17 qubit prototype quantum processor to the still-experimental service. Google has said it is producing a machine with 49 qubits, although it’s unclear whether this is the computer being offered over the internet to outside users.
Experts see that benchmark as more theoretical than practical. “You could do some reasonablysized damage with that — if it fell over and landed on your foot,” said Seth Lloyd, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Useful applications, he argued, will arrive when a system has more than 100 qubits.
Yet Lloyd credits Google for stirring broader interest.
Now, there are quantum startups “popping up like mushrooms,” he said. — Bloomberg