Amazon on Thursday revealed its first chip for quantum computing, and said the design is a step toward building efficient high-scale systems.
The processor is called Ocelot, and the announcement comes as more tech companies tout their advancements in quantum. Last week, Amazon cloud rival Microsoft showed off its inaugural quantum chip. Microsoft had a paper in the journal Nature documenting its quantum work, and this week Amazon followed suit.
Some technologists hope quantum computers will be capable of solving problems that stump classical computers. PCs and phones run calculations and store data with bits that are either on or off, while quantum computers work with quantum bits, or qubits, that can operate in both states simultaneously.
“We believe that scaling Ocelot to a full-fledged quantum computer capable of transformative societal impact would require as little as one-tenth as many resources as common approaches, helping bring closer the age of practical quantum computing,” Fernando Brandão, Amazon Web Services’ director of applied science, and Oskar Painter, the cloud group’s quantum hardware chief, wrote in a blog post.
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has funded quantum computing research for two decades, but the technology has been slow to make its way to consumers and businesses.
“That’s because they’re not big enough yet,” said Peter Barrett, founder and general partner at Playground Global, which has backed quantum startups Phasecraft and PsiQuantum.
At a million qubits, there are enough bits that the technology will work even if there are some problems, Barrett said. Google’s Willow, the world’s top quantum chip, features just 105, while Amazon’s Ocelot has only nine, Painter told CNBC.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in 2020, when he was head of AWS, that the company was “optimistic in the future that quantum computing will play a role” as cloud gets bigger in large companies and the public sector.
Six months after Jassy made those comments, AWS released the Amazon Braket service, allowing developers to experiment with quantum computers from other companies, including IonQ and Rigetti Computing. Microsoft’s Azure cloud has a similar offering. Amazon is planning for future versions of its quantum chips to become available through Braket, Painter said
In 2023, AWS senior vice president Peter DeSantis talked about building a quantum processor at the cloud group’s Reinvent conference in Las Vegas, promising more details in the future.
Like Microsoft, Amazon fabricated its chip internally. Building a system boasting a million qubits will take collaborations with world-leading semiconductor manufacturers, according to Barrett. Outsourcing to a partner is an option as Amazon progresses with quantum hardware, Painter said.
Public interest in the space has risen lately, Painter said, as companies have discussed new ways of assembling qubits that are resistant to errors. Amazon designed Ocelot to tackle the problem of error correction, and Google’s Willow also demonstrated improvements in that area, Painter said.
Painter estimated that commercial workloads won’t be running on quantum computers for 10 years or more.
At a meeting with analysts in January, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said useful quantum computers could be 15 to 30 years away. Days later, Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan that he isn’t a quantum computing expert but said most people believe it’s at least a decade from being viable.
Pat Gelsinger, Intel’s former CEO, is more optimistic.
“I stand by my prediction years ago — by 2030, useful quantum computing,” Gelsinger wrote in a LinkedIn comment on Wednesday.
WATCH: Quantum: Tech’s next battlefield
