Amazon Web Services (AWS) has unveiled its ‘Ocelot’ quantum computing chip, a breakthrough the company hopes will significantly expedite the development of commercially viable quantum computers. The announcement, made on Thursday, marks a significant step in the race to harness the power of quantum mechanics for complex calculations.
Quantum computers hold the potential to revolutionize fields such as drug discovery and materials science by solving problems currently intractable for even the most powerful conventional computers. However, a key challenge lies in the fragility of qubits, the fundamental units of quantum information, which are prone to errors.
AWS’s ‘Ocelot’ chip utilizes ‘cat’ qubits, a novel approach that minimizes the number of physical qubits needed to achieve useful computing power. Oskar Painter, AWS director of quantum hardware, explained that the ‘Ocelot’ prototype demonstrates the ability to create one working logical qubit from only nine physical qubits. This is a significant advancement compared to the industry’s prior estimates requiring about a million physical qubits to achieve a useful number of logical qubits.
“It should allow us to provide between five and 10 times lower numbers of physical qubits to implement the error correction in a fully scaled machine. So that’s the real benefit,” Painter told Reuters.
Painter stated that the current chip was constructed using standard techniques borrowed from the chip industry and a material called tantalum, but that AWS and partners hope to customize those techniques further.
The AWS announcement comes at a time of intense competition in the quantum computing sector, with Google, Microsoft, and PsiQuantum also reporting advancements in recent months. AWS aims to leverage these materials and processing improvements to reduce development timelines. The company’s ultimate goal is to build quantum computers with as few as 100,000 qubits, a substantial reduction from prior estimates.
