The introduction of Quantum computing promises to leapfrog everyone

After a while, we learned announcement and Amazon that it will be hosting a quantum computer from its partner QuEra as soon as sometime in 2028. The system promised visible figures compared to anything on the market today: for 10,000 individual qubits, each one has a very small error that the system can support hundreds of errors in controlling logical qubits. But QuEra has to get there from its current hardware, which sits at 260 qubits which is an error.

The details of how to get there were left out last Wednesday, when QuEra announced its roadmap. But the announcement only added to the gap: There will be no new hardware releases between now and the practical machine, and QuEra promises to deliver a more powerful machine one year later.

“The company has decided not to sell NISQ (intermediate noise level) systems anymore,” QuEra’s Yuval Borger told Ars. The two systems he previously presented have similar capabilities, with about 250 hardware qubits and an acceptable throughput—enough to test debugging codes, but not enough to use logical qubits in real-time applications.

The machine they want to build at Amazon will be a very different beast. It will contain more than 10,000 qubits, which Quera plans to use to create 256 finely tuned defects. With error correction in place, this will have a 99.9999 percent error-free rate, which the company hopes will make millions of users work better. And there is a follow up. By 2029, QuEra promises a successor with twice as many hardware qubits, capable of supporting 1,000 logical qubits. Error rejection will increase to 99.9999999 percent.

The QuEra system works by using neutral atoms stored in a grid with lasers, so increasing the number of qubits is a matter of increasing the laser power. And the two academic labs that developed QuEra and the IP licensed to them have already demonstrated it a 3,000-qubit system. Multiplying is difficult, but there is a way to figure it out. The labs have also demonstrated the ability to replace atoms that are lost during operation, an ability that is essential for the machine to function.