What is Quantum Computing?

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What is Quantum Computing? | Future Business

Business applications

Despite these teething issues, researchers are increasingly certain that quantum computing has a bright future in business, and as a result investors are flocking to fund R&D. Consultancy CB Insights estimates that venture capital funding in the space grew by 500% from 2015 to 2020.

“As the number of qubits grows, these supercomputers will begin being used to solve real business problems—such as managing agricultural risk—in the latter half of this decade,” Arvind Krishna, CEO of IBM, notes “And once it starts, it’s going to take off like a rocket ship.”

Professional services firm Deloitte expects quantum technologies will enable innovations in drug and materials discovery, financial portfolio management, climate and weather modelling, fabrication optimization, and behavioural analytics, among many other sectors.

IDC predicts that the worldwide quantum computing market will reach US$8.6 billion by 2027, a monumental increase from just US$412 million in 2020, as the number of applications for quantum computers grows rapidly this decade.

The firm forecasts that breakthroughs in quantum research will support a booming platform market, allowing businesses to access Quantum Computing as a Service (QCaaS) and carry out performance intensive computing on demand by the end of the decade.

“Advances in quantum computing will be a drumbeat over time with the most distant advances being most relevant to the most complex problems,” West of IDC adds.

This growth will be spurred by record spending on R&D, with IDC forecasting that “the industry will pour billions of dollars into making the technology common place and ready for mass adoption” as investment in quantum computing reaches US$16.4 billion, almost double the sector’s market value, by the end of 2027.

“For many critical problems, classical computing will run out of steam in the next decade and we will see quantum computing take over as the next generation of performance-intensive computing” predicts Peter Rutten, global research lead for performance intensive computing at IDC.

Business use cases vary from industry to industry but likely candidates for the first quantum computers are tasks that require optimization algorithms, intensive data analysis, complex mathematical modelling or molecular simulation. Scott Buchholz, Managing Director at Deloitte, notes that “the promise of tantalizing speed continues to drive investment” and this is helping to create a ‘flourishing’ quantum start-up ecosystem however predictions on the true business impact remain inexact.

“One research firm projects the quantum computing market to grow at a CAGR of 56.0%, eventually reaching nearly US$65 billion by 2030. Another forecasts that quantum computing will give a competitive advantage to 25% of Fortune 500 companies in less than three years—a bold assertion given the maturity of the technology,” Buchholz concludes.

Quantum supremacy

The phrase Quantum Supremacy has made headlines in recent years as the race to create the first functioning quantum computers has heated up. Originally coined as a term to describe the point when quantum computers are able to carry out calculations that would be impossible by traditional methods, it has increasingly been appropriated to describe the ‘arms race’ to build a general-purpose quantum machine.

One key aspect of this is the unique threat posed by quantum computers to current encoding techniques. The entangled nature of qubits means that quantum computers will be highly capable of cracking existing encryption, rendering financial, business or military secrets exposed.

“Quantum computers will render most existing encryption methods useless. They will jeopardize our way of life,” Ilyas Khan, CEO of tech developer Quantinuum, explains.

In October 2019, search giant Google announced it had demonstrated technical quantum supremacy, using a microprocessor based on super-conducting materials with 53 qubits. This system took 200 seconds to solve a problem that would take the world’s fastest supercomputer 10,000 years to complete.

Peter Knight, a physicist at Imperial College London called the engineering behind the project ‘phenomenal” and calling it a “stepping-stone toward a big dream” that showed “quantum computing is really hard but not impossible”.

A little over a year later, Chinese researchers announced an even more powerful system, capable of completing calculations in minutes that would take some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers more than 2 billion years to complete.

Estimates suggest that the US and China are each investing more than US$100 million per year on quantum research with competition forecast to rise as tensions between the two nations continues to build. While this may be bad for geopolitics, it will undoubtedly spur new innovation in quantum computing and further improvements for speed or capacity, making it likely that this will be the decade that quantum computing enters the mainstream.

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