A Quantum Computing Arms Race Will Lead to First Results

In this year’s hype cycle for emerging technologies, Gartner estimated that quantum computing is still more than ten years away. However, the developments in quantum computing are going a lot faster than expected. The race for the holy grail of computing is on and companies such as Google, D-Wave or IBM, universities such as Yale or UNSW or startups such as Rigetti Computing are all working on developing quantum computers. Each of these organisations has reported breakthroughs in 2017, with the latest being IBM who announced the first 50-qubit quantum processor in November 2017.
A 50-qubit quantum processor is getting closer to quantum supremacy, which IBM now estimates to be at around 57-qubits. Quantum supremacy is defined as the ability of quantum computing to solve problems which can no longer be solved with the world's fastest supercomputer. Not only organisations are working on achieving this quantum supremacy, but also countries are investing billions in it. China is building the world's biggest quantum research facility. Their objective is to have a quantum computer by 2020 that has the computational power of a million times all computers in the world combined.
With several organisations aiming to reach quantum supremacy before the end of this year, there is a real arms race going on. According to Vijay Pande, a partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, quantum computing is moving out of the science domain and into the engineering phase. Therefore, 2018 will likely see several organisations reach quantum supremacy and focus on scaling up the technology to start working on some of the world’s biggest problems.