Quantum chip companies are at the forefront of developing and manufacturing semiconductor devices that exploit quantum mechanical phenomena. These chips are used in a variety of applications, including quantum computing, communication, and sensing. In this article, we will introduce you to the most reputable companies in the industry.
How Many Companies Are Working On Quantum Chips in 2024?
What do Intel, AMD, Apple, Cyrix, IBM, VIA Technologies, Centaur Technologies, and Arm Ltd all have in common?
In case you don’t know — but I’m sure many of you will — they’re all CPU manufacturers.
As we leave the world of Web 2.0 and enter Web3, a salient point comes into the conversation that the computational power required just so things run as smoothly as possible will be many orders of magnitude greater than what they are now, putting pressure on them like never before — Gordon Moore and his law are obviously going to be compromised at some point.
Hopefully, one day, classical processing chips — at least for some tasks — will be replaced by their quantum equivalent, quantum processing units (QPUs).
Although we are now in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum — or NISQ — era of quantum computation, still far away from reaching a level of quantum error correction, scalability and manufacturing good enough to make quantum computers useful in our everyday lives, we’ve come a long way since a team at the National Institute of Standards and Technology designed and manufactured the first chip-scale quantum computing device in 2009.
However, to get to where we want to be, we need to have companies like the ones above manufacturing CPUs doing just that for quantum computers.
According to The Quantum Insider’s proprietary data platform, there are close to 200 companies organized in our taxonomy whose primary focus is on quantum Software; while just over 20 companies are working on quantum computer Processors and Chips.
Of all different sizes, budgets and strategies — from 1QBit, Xanadu, QuTech to SeeQC and others — these companies are the future of the quantum computing industry. However, when we want to talk about the here and now, and about enterprises actually producing quantum computing chips to an acceptable standard and quantity as of June 2024, the five companies listed below really stand out.
Top 5 Companies Producing Quantum Computing Chips
1. Google: Sycamore
“Sycamore” is a 53-qubit quantum chip created by Google’s Artificial Intelligence division. Released in 2019, it is based on superconducting transmon architecture.
2. Intel: Tangle Lake (QC Chip)
In 2018 Intel released “Tangle Lake”, a superconducting 49-qubit chip, named after a chain of lakes in Alaska.
3. IBM: Eagle (Quantum Chip)
Another company leveraging superconducting qubits, IBM achieved a huge milestone in 2021 when it broke the 100-qubit threshold with its quantum computing chip codenamed “Eagle”, containing 127 qubits
4. Rigetti Computing: Aspen-M/Aspen-11
Rigetti Computing’s superconducting Rigetti Aspen-M processor is based on scalable multi-chip technology and is assembled from two 40-qubit chips. The single 40-qubit Aspen-11 processor is also available.
5. D-Wave: Advantage (Quantum Processor)
A QPU based on quantum annealing — an optimization process for finding the global minimum of a given objective function over a given set of candidate solutions — the Advantage processor has over 5,000 qubits and 15-way qubit connectivity, empowering enterprises to solve their largest and most complex business problems. It was released in 2020.
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