- D-Wave on Wednesday announced it had achieved quantum supremacy with its annealing chip.
- Quantum stocks spiked after the news, which suggests quantum machines can outperform classical tech.
- Wednesday’s gains helped the industry rebound from a dip spurred by skepticism from Jensen Huang.
Quantum stocks spiked on Wednesday after Canadian company D-Wave said it had achieved the elusive industry benchmark of “quantum supremacy,” suggesting its specialized annealing chip can outperform classical computers in certain tasks.
“It’s the holy grail for quantum computing. It’s what everybody aspires to and is the reason there’s so much confusion around quantum supremacy versus quantum advantage versus quantum utility because supremacy — true supremacy — hadn’t been achieved yet,” Alan Barrett, D-Wave’s CEO, told Business Insider. “And so the industry was coming up with terms that were easier to achieve, but this is that demonstration of true supremacy, and we’re very excited.”
The corresponding market surge — which saw D-Wave’s stock spike over 8% by market close and sent other quantum companies like IonQ up over 16% — helped the industry recover from a dip following recent skepticism from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
In January, Huang suggested the industry is at least 20 years away from quantum computing being “very useful,” sending quantum stocks tumbling.
While D-Wave’s announcement didn’t fully claw back the losses that followed Huang’s remarks, it sent a jolt through the market and made waves in the industry surrounding the burgeoning technology.
Quantum computing is rapidly evolving, with Big Tech players like IBM and Google racing to scale up the devices enough to be commercially useful. While advancement has long been slowed by deeply technical problems involving error correction and scalability, researchers say cracking the code to unlock quantum computing’s potential could help discover new drugs, develop new chemical compounds, or break encryption methods, among other outcomes.
That is why D-Wave’s announcement, which follows new quantum chip debuts from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, is such a big deal. The Canadian company says its annealing quantum computer outperformed one of the world’s most powerful classical supercomputers when solving complex simulation calculations related to magnetic materials discovery.
The company says its quantum computer performed a magnetic materials simulation in just minutes — one that would take a classical supercomputer built with GPU clusters nearly one million years and more than the world’s annual electricity consumption to solve.
Quantum annealing vs. gate-based approaches
D-Wave’s approach is not without its skeptics. The research paper published by the company’s researchers in the journal Science stopped short of describing its findings as “quantum supremacy,” instead using the milder term “quantum advantage” to outline its findings.
Eric Chitambar, a researcher of quantum information science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said D-Wave’s annealing approach has drawbacks — like narrower practical applications and reduced fault tolerance, meaning it’s not likely to produce a full-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer.
The narrow scope of the annealing method’s potential applications is why the other major players in the quantum space have invested heavily in a gate-based approach. This approach relies on quantum logic gates as the foundation of quantum circuits, similar to how classical logic gates operate for conventional circuits. It has the potential for broader applications despite slower progress in development than the annealing approach.
“But even if they don’t have something that is going to be a universal, scalable quantum computer, that doesn’t mean there isn’t value there,” Chitambar said of D-Wave’s announcement.
Harley Johnson, the chief executive for Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park, told Business Insider that certain types of computers are better at solving specific problems. D-Wave’s announcement is a prime example of a narrowly tailored machine proving its utility.
But now that quantum computing is moving beyond proving its commercial value, Johnson said, it’s time to focus on maximizing the return on the massive investment that has brought the quantum industry this far.
“The thinking about quantum advantage, or quantum supremacy, needs to take into account the additional information about economic advantage,” Johnson said. “What does it cost me to get to a solution on a conventional computer versus on a quantum computer? Can I solve it more cheaply than I could solve it on a conventional computer? I think that’s the next really important way to think about quantum advantage.”
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