Nobel Prize Winner, HPE, Chip Industry Companies Team Up to Create Practical Quantum Supercomputer

By Stephen Nellis

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -John M. Martinis, one of the winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics for his advances in quantum computing, on Monday formed an alliance with HPE and several chip companies to create a practical, mass-producible quantum supercomputer.

Quantum computers promise to solve problems in chemistry, medicine and other fields that would take classical computers thousands of years.‌

Large technology companies such as IBM, microsoft and Alphabet’s Google, where Martinis worked before co-founding his current startup Qolab, are racing to develop the technology.

But those efforts are largely one-offs, with small teams building one computer at a time. The new group, called the Quantum Scaling Alliance, aims to build quantum computers that can be made with ‌the same tools that produce hundreds of millions of chips a year for smartphones, laptops or artificial intelligence servers.

Since the first work in this field in the 1980s, quantum chips, which…