Why quantum scales on compute-per-watt, not qubit count

The unfettered growth of AI is constrained by the need for tremendous amounts of power, creating a growing environmental challenge as it is more widely deployed.

In comparison, in a recent opinion piece for TechRadar Pro, Matthijs (Matt) Rijlaarsdam, CEO and co-founder of our portfolio company QuantWare, argues that the growth of quantum computing can have a real positive environmental impact, as its energy requirements are inherently more constrained.

His case is that quantum should be judged on compute-per-watt and cost, rather than the energy required to support largescale qubit systems alone.

The quantum challenge today is to scale existing superconducting quantum systems, which have been stuck at around 100 qubits for almost a decade.

With today’s early systems, more power goes into running the machine than into computation. That should change as companies like QuantWare help to develop larger scale quantum computers.

On the cost side, Matt says at current prices, a million-qubit machine would cost between $100bn and $1tn, but Matt argues that the cost per qubit should fall by at least a hundredfold, as these larger scale quantum computers are developed.

He points to the cost curves surrounding the development of other technologies such as solar panels, batteries, and transistors as great analogies, and they benefited in innovation breakthroughs and high volume manufacturing. Costs can fall even more rapidly as specialist companies, tackling specific pain-points or bottlenecks, focus on building discrete components of the overall system.

The choices made in the next few years will determine whether quantum becomes an industry of expensive demonstrations or of useful computers.

We are backing QuantWare to help build the latter.

Read the full article HERE.