Google’s Quantum Artificial Intelligence team has announced that it will now be designing and building its own quantum computer chips. Google will absorb UC Santa Barbara’s quantum computing group, which recently created a superconducting five-qubit array that shows promise for scaling up to larger, commercial systems.
Google, probably just behind IBM, now appears to be one of quantum computing’s largest commercial interests. As you may know, Google has been researching potential applications of quantum computing since at least May 2013, when it bought a D-Wave quantum annealing computer with NASA. The Vesuvius chip inside the D-Wave system is kind of quantum, but not truly quantum in the sense that most scientists and physicists would describe a quantum computer.
Benchmarks have shown that the D-Wave system only provides small speed-ups under very specific workloads, and in some cases, just your standard desktop PC might be faster than the D-Wave. We’re not saying that Google was hoodwinked, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it’s now investing in a very different area of quantum computing.