Sitting in an office at QuEra Computing’s Boston headquarters, Yuval Boger was talking about the recent advancements made in quantum computing that are driving the chorus around an accelerated the timeframe the launch of a usable and reliable system.
“Sometimes it’s hard to see all the amazing progress that’s been happening,” Boger, QuEra’s chief commercial officer, told The Next Platform in a recent interview. “But if you go back a few years – five or ten years ago – the question was, ‘Could people actually build a quantum computer, any quantum computer?’ People understood the science a while ago, or at least the theoretical science, but could you make it? Then IBM and IQM Quantum Computers and Quantinuum and Google and us and many others have said, ‘Yeah.’ By now, it’s a given. People assume that you could build a quantum computer.”
There has been a rush of recent announcements that bolster that contention, with vendors arguing that the question about quantum computers is now “when” rather than “if,” and that “when” could be closer than it appears. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon Web Services all have made high-profile disclosures new or enhanced quantum chips that address the key issue of error correction, with Microsoft declaring that its new Majorana 1 quantum chip means that reliable, fault-tolerant quantum computers are years away, rather than decades.
More recently, IBM in late May announced plans to release a fault-tolerant quantum system – dubbed Quantum Starling – by 2029, that can run quantum circuits with 100 million quantum gates on 200 logical qubits. The next step to Starling will be successive releases of IBM’s upcoming Nighthawk quantum processor starting this year and running through 2028.
The Money Rolls In
There also is more investment money being spend in the market and more partnerships as innovation in the space accelerates. IT giants like Nvidia are looking to muscle their way in, and D-Wave, which has made its annealing Advantage quantum systems available via its Leap cloud platform, sold its first on-premises computer to Germany’s Forschungszentrum Jülich and created a business to sell other systems. That was before it rolled out its Advantage 2 quantum chip and unveiled an aggressive roadmap in March of this year.
QuEra has been in the middle of all this. In February, the company announced a $230 million funding round that included Google, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, and other investors, and followed the $47 million raised in October 2024. The company will use the money to continue building its fault-tolerant technology, hire more scientists and engineers, and grow its partnership lineup of research labs, Fortune 500 companies, and government agencies. In March, QuEra joined Quantinuum and Quantum Machines in announcing their participation in Nvidia’s effort to launch a quantum research center in Boston to develop and provide new technologies and research for quantum computing.
Taking Quantum Systems On The Road
Late last month, QuEra installed its first quantum systems outside of its own labs – where its Aquila system (shown below) is housed – sending the gate-based neutral-atom Gemini quantum computer to Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. It came a year after the institute contracted with QuEra for $41 million to supply the system to the new G-QuAT quantum-AI research center. The QuEra systems is working next to the Nvidia-powered ABCI-Q supercomputer.
Around the same time, QuEra also delivered a gate-based neutral-atom quantum system to the National Quantum Computing Centre at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire, England.
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