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Google has officially unveiled its new quantum AI campus in Santa Barbara, California. The developers on this campus will work on Google’s commercial quantum computer that will probably come in 2029.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai had announced the company’s plans for building a quantum computer during the 2021 I/O event. By building the new campus, Google will have a dedicated center that acts as its first quantum data center, quantum hardware research laboratories, and its quantum processor chip fabrication facilities.
According to Google Quantum AI lead engineer Erik Lucero, their goal is to build “an error-corrected quantum computer for the world.”
Of course, moving toward quantum computing is not something new for Google, and they have a dedicated team that has worked on quantum hardware and software for years.
Google has a quantum processor called “Sycamore,” and the company claimed they’d reached quantum supremacy. Dates back to 2019, Google’s Sycamore chip could solve a very complex computation in 200 seconds while completing the same task took 10,000 years for supercomputers. Google says its quantum efforts will help the researchers and developers to solve near-term problems.
Google isn’t the only company that wants to work on quantum computers, and other companies like IBM have similar plans. Using quantum computing for medical applications is something that both companies have focused on.
Google wants to build a quantum computer by 2029
Erik Lucero believes new global challenges like global warming and pandemics require a new kind of computing. Quantum computers could have many benefits for human life, and they can turn time-consuming and costly tasks into easy-to-solve and cheap matters. Moreover, they can accelerate innovation in science, design, and business.
Of course, this wouldn’t be an easy journey for Google. As Lucero says, they need to build 1,000,000 physical qubits, and these qubits should work inside a room-sized error-corrected quantum computer. Most current quantum processors have less than 100 qubits. So jumping to 1 million qubits requires years of effort.
“To get there, we must build the world’s first “quantum transistor” — two error-corrected “logical qubits” performing quantum operations together — and then figure out how to tile hundreds to thousands of them to form the error-corrected quantum computer. That will take years.” Lucero said in its blog post.