particular rivalry growing between the U.S. and China. Elsa Kania, adjunct fellow at the Center for a New American Security, has said: “It’s clear that China is taking advantage of what it sees as a historic opportunity to not only catch up with but to leapfrog ahead of the United States.” To counter that, U.S. Congress passed the bipartisan National Quantum Initiative Act in 2018. President Trump then signed it into law. As a result, our government is committed to devoting $1.2 Billion to QC research and development over the next 10 years. The Center also reported that China has given its nationallysponsored scientists and engineers nearly unlimited resources to work with plus billions of dollars in funding. In his January 2018 New Year’s address, Xi Jinping—president of the People’s Republic of China since March 2013—underscored the technology’s strategic importance.
IBM and Google, yes, but also Intel Corp., Microsoft Corp. and the Chinabased multinationals Baidu Inc. and Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. Google made headlines last October when its researchers claimed to have made a breakthrough in “quantum supremacy,” solving a problem traditional computers could not. In 200 seconds (roughly 3.3 minutes), the Sycamore quantum computer developed by Google’s A.I. Quantum team completed a computation that would have taken the fastest supercomputers 10,000 years to sort out. Project details were captured in a report run in “Nature” authored by 77 scientists involved in the Google and University of California Santa Barbara joint venture. The announcement drew quick responses from competitors at Intel, etc. Researchers at IBM challenged the claim in a blog post, stating it would take a supercomputer with the right setup 2.5 days to solve
CORPORATIONS: U.S. & ABROAD
Tech giants tackling QC have included
Below: IBM Q computation center
the problem. Meanwhile, Intel Labs Managing Director Rich Uhlig, PhD, responded that practical uses for QC were years away: “The field is still at mile one of what will be a marathon toward quantum computing’s commercialization.” At the January consumer electronics show in Las Vegas, CES 2020, IBM announced the latest landmark in its own research: It had doubled the power of its Raleigh quantum computer. (IBM has routinely named its systems after cities.) The company’s stated goal is to develop QC systems it will then make available to an array of industries, deploying a strategy similar to the one it used to commercialize high-performance computing, aka supercomputing, technology. Afterward, Delta Air Lines Inc. announced it would be the first industry partner to join IBM’s Q Network hub on the North Carolina State University Raleigh campus. Delta and more than 100 other organizations work with IBM at various hubs to advance related
20 | DIGITAL UNICORN Q3 2020
SOURCES: IUCN, HWC, WWF
