One of the most interesting funding deals of the fall just happened: the Silicon Valley chip designer NVIDIA invested an undisclosed sum of money in QuEra, a Boston startup that is building quantum computers.
With the announcement last week, NVIDIA joins Google and SoftBank in betting on QuEra — and solidifies QuEra’s spot as the best-capitalized quantum startup in Massachusetts, with more than $275 million raised since it was founded in 2018.
It’s also NVIDIA’s most notable local move since March, when it announced it would set up a new research center in the Boston area, the NVIDIA Accelerated Quantum Computing Research Center. QuEra and NVIDIA plan to collaborate using the new center’s resources, according to a press release last week.
I dropped by QuEra’s offices over the summer to catch up with Yuval Boger, the company’s Chief Commercial Officer, and see the computers they are building and operating. One of them is already available to people who want to use it on Amazon’s “Braket” cloud service.
Quantum vs. traditional computers
Traditional computers rely on millions or billions of switches called transistors, and those switches can be in either an ‘on’ or ‘off’ state. This binary encoding (0s and 1s) underpins all of today’s computers. In contrast, quantum computers are built around quantum bits, or qubits. Qubits can exist in a “superposition” of both the 0 and 1 states at once, as well as any quantum state in between.
How sophisticated is this stuff? QuEra’s qubits are individual atoms of the metal rubidium, controlled by lasers.
Because of that, many proponents of quantum computing say that it will be better at simulating complex phenomena — like weather, the way drugs behave inside a person’s body or the chemical reactions inside a battery. But today’s quantum computers are still somewhat error-prone and rough around the edges.
“Conventional wisdom these days is that in two or three years, quantum computers will be sufficiently strong to solve some chemistry and material science problems,” Boger said. “It’s not surprising that it’s chemistry and material science [first], because these are problems that exhibit quantum mechanical properties. How does a molecule behave, and so on.
‘Q Day’ is on the horizon
“Maybe in five years, you’ll be able to use a quantum computer to optimize your financial portfolio better. Maybe in 10 or 20 years, you’ll be able to, for better or worse, break the world’s encryption using a quantum computer,” he added.
That’s a problem that many governments and corporations are already thinking about. They call it “Q Day” — the day when someone somewhere develops a powerful enough quantum computer that can break encryption systems. The U.S. government — and many major corporations — have identified it as a major cybersecurity threat.
When I visited QuEra’s office, I had to sign an attestation that I was a citizen of the U.S. That’s because quantum computing technology, and exports of it, are controlled by the Department of Commerce as vital to the country’s national security.
“We are building some of the world’s most advanced quantum computers and … a lot of people want to understand what’s in them.”
Already, Boger said that the early users of QuEra’s quantum computers have been trying to solve problems such as the best placement for electric-vehicle chargers and a better understanding of the effects of new drugs when clinical trial populations are small.
Boston is a quantum computing hotspot
“The quantum computing ecosystem in Boston is really one of the hotspots in the U.S.,” Catherine Lefebvre said. “With all the experts at MIT, Harvard and other top universities — you have a lot of investors too — there are all the ingredients for a very strong ecosystem.”
Lefebvre tracks the industry as a senior advisor to the Open Quantum Institute, which aims to ensure that quantum computing is developed “for the benefit of humanity.”
QuEra’s technology “is pretty advanced, and they’re moving fast and steadily,” she said. But compared to other companies, they are still a “small player,” with a small team and facility.
But Lefebvre said that “it is way too early to pick a winner” among the many startups — and larger companies, such as IBM and Microsoft — that are developing quantum computers.