Amazon unveils its first quantum computing chip

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Amazon.com’s cloud-computing business on Thursday unveiled its first-ever quantum computing chip, which it claims marks an important step in the development of useful, reliable quantum computers. The chip, dubbed Ocelot, can lower the costs of reducing quantum computing errors by up to 90%, the Seattle-based tech giant said.

The race to build a practical quantum computer has been heating up among startups and the world’s biggest tech companies. Amazon Web Services’ announcement comes just a week after Microsoft claimed a quantum computing breakthrough by creating a new state of matter. Google in December said it developed a new chip, called Willow, that it said marks an advance in solving quantum’s error-correction issues.

Amazon’s Ocelot chip is a prototype, not a “full-blown quantum system," said Oskar Painter, head of quantum hardware for AWS. “It’s designed to test our ability to perform quantum error correction, and once we have that building block, then we can scale it up to a much larger size." One of quantum computing’s biggest challenges is that qubits, the basic units of quantum computation, generate errors as they tackle problems, with the errors increasing as quantum systems get bigger. Qubits are fragile and susceptible to “noise," essentially small disturbances in the environment like heat and vibrations, which force them out of their quantum state.

Quantum error correction is used to help fix the problems created from that noise. Quantum computers can crunch numbers in a fundamentally different way from traditional computers, and can do certain computations orders of magnitude faster. They can be useful in areas including drug discovery, data encryption and