164
FORTUNE.COM // JUNE.1.19
wait for the technology to mature.
Still, recent advances—from Silicon
Valley to China, not to mention Yorktown
Heights—have convinced much of the
corporate world that this technology will
soon move off the theoretical wish list.
Companies across all industries are hoping
to exploit quantum computing to surmount
obstacles that have thwarted them for
years. Nation-states are mobilizing, too,
pouring billions of dollars into research in
the hopes of gaining an edge in an area that
could someday separate the world’s eco-
nomic—and military—haves and have-nots.
Quantum information science, which is still
early in attracting private industry invest-
ment, “screams at you that it is the exact
place where federal R&D dollars are best
utilized,” says Michael Kratsios, President
Trump’s top tech adviser and his nominee
to be chief technology officer of the U.S.
The reason: The quantum computer may
be our best hope of overcoming the limita-
tions of ordinary computing. Moore’s law,
the guiding principle of the tech industry,
states that computing power should double
roughly every two years as a result of the
increase in the number of transistors a
microchip can contain. But scientists are
reaching the limit on how close together
they can smoosh transistors on silicon
chips. Everyone has been thinking, “What
the heck comes after Moore’s law?” Gil says.
He and many others think that quantum
computing, especially in conjunction with
artificial intelligence, provides an answer.
A milestone test is not far ahead.
Google believes it will reach “quantum
supremacy”—a stunt-like demonstration of
a machine’s superiority over a traditional
computer—in the very near term. Chinese
scientists say they’re on a similar timeline.
Once that bar is cleared, “businesses and
technologists will look at that and realize
it’s not just some promising technology in
the future, but something powerful work-
ing right now,” says John Martinis, who
leads Google’s quantum efforts.T WAS A MARVEL of engineering, a
harbinger of a future of unimagi-
nable computational power.
It also bore a striking resem-
blance to a garbage can.
Q System One was a quantum
computer. The machine was
the culmination of a year—or
decades, depending on how one
measures—of labor and ingenu-
ity from IBM scientists. The
researchers had assembled this
stalactite of nested canisters in the recesses of the company’s neo-
futuristic research center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. The white, re-
frigerated contraption dangled from a nine-foot, cubic, aluminum
and steel frame. In the innermost chamber: a special processor
whose progeny could help solve some of the world’s most intrac-
table science and business problems. This particular generation
featured the firepower of 20 quantum bits, or “qubits,” the power-
ful data units upon which these dream machines operate.
The machine was incredibly impressive, in theory; the qubits
were unusually high-quality, and its error rates were relatively
low—crucial advantages in the quest to make a quantum computer
viable for real-life problem-solving. Granted, the thing was a little
underwhelming in person, shielded in that drab receptacle. (At
one meeting last November, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty remarked
that it looked like a trash can.) But the scientists had a plan to
get it ready for its close-up. IBM had hired a boutique London
designer to shield the Q System hardware in a shiny, black metallic
shell. Already, the entire contraption had been set in an air- and
temperature-controlled, borosilicate glass enclosure designed by
Goppion, the Milanese firm known for making display cases for the
Mona Lisa and the crown jewels at the Tower of London.
By the time IBM unveiled its creation this January, at the Con-
sumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas—a venue normally reserved
for the debuts of flashy consumer gadgetry like virtual-reality
headsets and phones with foldable screens—it had a supercomput-
er that looked super. The press and public ate it up. A “gleaming
monolith from a sci-fi blockbuster,” gushed MIT Technology Re-
view. “It looks like a computer from the future,” effused The Verge.
“Everybody takes selfies with the quantum computer,” says Dario
Gil, head of IBM’s research division, who calls the technology an
“object of fascination.”
Such allure, at the moment, is grounded more in hope than in re-
sults. Quantum computers can’t do much of commercial value yet;
they’re still inching their way toward usefulness. The technologies
that make them so potentially fast and powerful also make them, in
their current iterations, unstable and error-prone compared with
the so-called classical computers we rely on every day. IBM calls
the Q System the “first integrated quantum computing system for
commercial use,” but “use,” in this case, is highly abstract: Compa-
nies can obtain access, via the Internet, to the quantum platform at
IBM’s facilities, running experiments and kicking the tires as they
I
QUANTUM COMPUTING BUSINESS BETS ON A QUANTUM LEAP
FANCY FREEZER
The Q Dilution Refrigerator cools IBM’s
quantum-computing system to the near-
absolute-zero temperatures at which it operates.