Late last month, IonQ announced a partnership with Switzerland-based QuantumBasel to jointly establish a European quantum data centre, with QuantumBasel offering the ecosystem of uptownBasel, including enterprises, research institutes, startups, and universities, direct access to the IonQ systems.
During the signing of the partnership, IonQ’s CEO Peter Chapman was interviewed by QuantumBasel on the scope of the collaboration.
“Well, what we found with QuantumBasel is they had the same vision as we do, especially in the application space,” said Chapman, when asked about the collaboration and the synergies it will create. “So, we look forward to working with the team here in producing the next generation of applications in quantum.”
Little Gold Box
Chapman was then asked about the little gold box he had brought with him to the signing of the partnership and about IonQ’s technology.
“What we brought today was a little quantum processor. It’s the next-generation QPU for one of our systems,” said Chapman. “And it has what we expect is algorithmic qubits of 64, which should be able to rival the world’s largest supercomputers for certain applications.”
The QuantumBasel interviewer then asked Chapman about IonQ’s technology and what IonQ can bring to the partnership and the larger quantum ecosystem in Switzerland.
“Our system is an optical quantum computer. We don’t use optical qubits, but the rest of the system is fully optical. And clearly, this part of the world is a leader in high-precision optical systems,” said Chapman. “Today, we use components from all over the world: about eighty percent of our system is actually made outside the US and a large part of that is from this part of the world. So, as we look to move to manufacture of quantum computing, so kind of getting out of the R&D systems and now into kind of a production point of view, this is particularly important for us.”
For QuantumBasel, the last question put to Chapman was which challenges in the industry can IonQ.
“I think quantum machine learning is certainly going to be one of the first sets of applications that will come out from the #AQ 35 system. At the #AQ 64, one can start to see many applications where you could get to quantum advantage or quantum supremacy. So, one would hope that things like pharma, which is also big in this area, in this part of the world — maybe not in a chemistry sense — but in a machine learning sense to be able to produce better drug candidates. This will be an exciting thing for the #AQ 64,” said Chapman.
Featured image: QuantumBasel
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