With more organizations adopting quantum computing, we will certainly leave 2023 more aware of its benefits and timeline.
2022 has been a dynamic year for quantum computing. With commercial breakthroughs such as the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) investing in its first quantum computer, the launch of the world’s first quantum computer capable of advantage over the cloud and the Nobel Prize in Physics awarded for ground-breaking experiments with entangled photons, the industry is making progress.
At the same time, 2022 saw the tremendous accomplishment of the exaflop barrier broken with the Frontier supercomputer. At a cost of roughly $600 million and requiring more than 20 megawatts of power, we are approaching the limits of what classical computing approaches can do on their own. Often for practical business reasons, many companies are not able to fully exploit the increasing amount of data available to them. This hampers digital transformation across areas most reliant on high-performance computing (HPC): healthcare, defense, energy and finance.
To stay ahead of the curve, 91% of global business leaders are investing or planning to invest in quantum computing. According to reports, 70% are developing real-life use cases and 61% are planning to spend $1 million or more over the next three years.
As the technology becomes more exciting and the industry gathers pace, the pressure is on for quantum to deliver. But the voice of skeptics will also grow louder. In the face of those that say quantum computers will never be useful due to their complexity and limited results to date, the question on everyone’s mind is, will 2023 be a breakthrough year for quantum computing?
During 2022, we saw the creation of many industry incumbents who used SPACs, IPOs, mergers or corporate sponsorship to build themselves substantial war chests to pursue some serious engineering activity. While these significant scale-up activities will continue, 2023 will also be the year of innovation and possible disruption.
Amongst the big players, new players will emerge with alternative approaches towards quantum computing: Perhaps replacing qubits and gate models with qumodes, using model simulations and quantum annealing models.
The aim of these newcomers will not be to solely achieve universal computing, but rather more specific and useful computation that can be delivered in a shorter timescale. The challenge will be whether these new machines can be applied to something useful and that the industry will care about them in the near term. The quantum supply chain is also developing with component-based suppliers — such as quantum processor vendors — that will shake loose how full-stack systems are built and break the economics of current black box approaches.
