Amazon (AMZN) on Thursday debuted its first ever quantum computing chip, joining a growing number of Big Tech names entering the quantum chip space. Called Ocelot, the chip, according to Amazon, helps solve a key problem for quantum computing systems, which could speed up the push to practical quantum computers.
Amazon’s announcement comes just a week after Microsoft (MSFT) revealed its own quantum chip called Majorana 1. Google (GOOG, GOOGL) debuted its quantum chip, Willow, in December. Gaining a lead in quantum computing would be a massive opportunity for the cloud giants, ensuring they’d have first-mover advantage in a field that could impact a slew of industries and help drive revenue growth for years.
Amazon says its chip helps enable what’s called bosonic error correction, an important step to figuring out how to get quantum computing systems to the point where they regularly solve the kinds of calculations that would take classic computers years to complete.
Quantum computing differs from classical computing because rather than using bits, the 1s and 0s that chips translate into the software you use every day, they rely on qubits. Instead of representing a 1 or a zero, qubits can exist as both a 1 and a 0 at the same time.
That allows quantum computers to process huge amounts of information far faster than classical computers. In some cases, quantum computers could perform tasks that would take a regular computer hundreds or thousands of years in minutes.
But qubits are also fragile, leaving them open to errors if they experience interference from the outside world. Amazon’s chip is meant to efficiently address these errors.
“We believe that Ocelot’s architecture, with its hardware-efficient approach to error correction, positions us well to tackle the next phase of quantum computing: learning how to scale,” Amazon’s head of quantum software applications, Fernando Brandão, and head of quantum hardware, Oskar Painter, said in a statement.
“Scaling frugally using hardware-efficiency will allow us to achieve more quickly and cost-effectively an error-corrected quantum computer that benefits society,” the two added.
Amazon’s announcement is just the latest in a string of quantum computing-focused news out of Big Tech players in the race to create a usable quantum computer that can process calculations related to topics ranging from healthcare to materials sciences and more.
Last week, Microsoft debuted its Majorana 1 chip, which the company said uses a new type of material called a topoconductor. According to Microsoft, the topoconductor takes advantage of a new state of matter that is not solid, liquid, or gas but a topological state, though some experts are skeptical of the claim.