Asset raider busts in, demands seat at Quantum table As if tape storage vendor Quantum doesn't have enough to worry about with its plummeting stock price, it's now facing an assault by Starboard Value, an asset raider, which says it has 16 per cent of the shares and wants board representation. Starboard Value "invests in deeply undervalued small cap companies and actively …
"Interestingly, Quantum's market capitalisation of $283.8m is less than its fiscal 2012 revenue of $652.4m. Look at it this way: you could buy a $652m annual cash flow for $284m, a ridiculous state of affairs."
That is only ridiculous if you have information on its operating costs. This information is absent from the article.
While business leaders expect quantum computing to play a significant role in industry by 2030, some experts don't believe the tech is going to be ready for production deployment in the near future.
The findings, from a survey titled "2022 Quantum Readiness" commissioned by consultancy EY, refer to UK businesses, although it is likely that the conclusions are equally applicable to global organizations.
According to EY, 81 percent of senior UK executives expect quantum computing to have a significant impact in their industry within seven and a half years, with almost half (48 percent) believing that quantum technology will begin to transform industries as soon as 2025.
Nothing in the quantum hardware world is fully cooked yet, but quantum computing is quite a bit further along than quantum networking – an esoteric but potentially significant technology area, particularly for ultra-secure transactions. Amazon Web Services is among those working to bring quantum connectivity from the lab to the real world.
Short of developing its own quantum processors, AWS has created an ecosystem around existing quantum devices and tools via its Braket (no, that's not a typo) service. While these bits and pieces focus on compute, the tech giant has turned its gaze to quantum networking.
Alongside its Center for Quantum Computing, which it launched in late 2021, AWS has announced the launch of its Center for Quantum Networking. The latter is grandly working to solve "fundamental scientific and engineering challenges and to develop new hardware, software, and applications for quantum networks," the internet souk declared.
Researchers in Canada have conducted a quantum computing experiment that they claim completes a calculation in just a fraction of a second that would take a conventional computer 9,000 years.
Jonathan Lavoie, an experimental physicist at quantum computing company Xanadu, and colleagues reported the results from a device designed to sample an unknown probability distribution of light passing through a network of optical fibers.
Quantum computing startup IonQ is facing a securities fraud lawsuit after a barrage of accusations came to light in a blistering report from Scorpion Capital, which claims the company lied about the maturity (and even existence of) its quantum device in addition to a smattering of claimed financial fictions.
The Scorpion Capital report, issued May 3, provides a rigorously scathing assessment of the IonQ technology, which is described as "a useless toy that can't even add 1+1" as assessed by internal experiments run by unnamed but numerous quantum experts hired by Scorpion and exhaustively detailed in the full report [PDF].
It's not just the company's technology on the chopping block, either. Scorpion Capital calls the startup "a part-time side-hustle run by two academics," one of whom, CEO and founder, Peter Chapman, "appears to be making up his MIT educational credentials," something we'll get to momentarily.
Updated BT and Toshiba have announced the trial of a commercial quantum secured metro network in London, set to run for three years to evaluate the use of the technology.
The system, which is operational now, uses quantum key distribution (QKD) over standard fibre optic links to securely encrypt data.
The London quantum secured metro network has netted accounting firm EY (formerly Ernst & Young) as its first customer. The company will use the network to connect two of its sites in the capital, one at Canary Wharf in London's Docklands, and the other near London Bridge. However, BT said there will be other users over the three-year period of the trial.
There's a potential solution on the cards to the energy expenditure problems plaguing AI training, and it sounds simple: just strengthen the "synapses" that move electrons through a memory array.
Electrical and Systems Engineering Professor Shantanu Chakrabartty and two of his colleagues at Washington University in St Louis, USA, have authored a Nature-published paper explaining how they have used the natural properties of electrons to reduce the energy used to train machine learning models.
The project had the researchers trying to build a learning-in-memory synaptic array that had digital synapses that operated dynamically instead of statically, such that they only need energy when changing a state, but not to maintain one.
Here's something we will only believe once we see it: A quantum computing chip the size of a large silicon wafer.
Paris-based quantum computing startup C12 Quantum Electronics is working on the multi-qubit chips in conjunction with CEA, the government-backed French research institution. CEA has an overall annual budget [PDF] of €5 billion and its own supercomputing bona fides, so at least the startup is getting some real research muscle behind it.
C12 said this new work is building from a "breakthrough in manufacturing quantum chips on 200mm silicon wafers." 200 millimeters equals roughly 7.8 inches in diameter, which is a very large surface on which to fabricate several qubits — short for quantum bits — the fundamental yet extremely delicate building blocks of quantum computers. Not many regular chip companies have even tried to make a wafer-size chip due to the multidimensional complexities involved. In recent memory, only Cerebras Systems comes to mind.
These days it seems every major company is outlining a quantum strategy, even if those plans are nebulous at best. However, in areas like financial services, especially at global banks like JPMorgan Chase, getting a handle on both quantum computing and quantum security are top priorities.
It all boils down to the next generation of secure transactions. As the reliability and capability of quantum computers expands those systems are more prepared to crack traditional modes of securing encrypted data. The best defense in this post-quantum security world are quantum communications and specifically, quantum key distribution (QKD).
Think of quantum communications as two parties agreeing on the same key using photonic-based quantum technology. Those parties agree on a key by measuring particles as they lose fidelity. As the distance increases between the two servers and particles break it becomes impractical to get them to agree on the same key, so getting distances ever-longer is one of the most pressing challenges when it comes to post-quantum security.
Huge, monolithic quantum computers aren't in IBM's vision of the technology. Rather, the IT giant sees parallel, distributed systems made up of different kinds of quantum computing units working in unison.
The tech titan said its new IBM Quantum System Two, announced on Monday, is its first step in its data-center-style approach to quantum computers, and an acknowledgment that quantum computers aren't all alike.
Its modular approach involves piecing together different types of quantum processing units, and have them communicate through an interconnect. These computing units will be stored in accessible refrigeration units.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that quantum computers will exist in some useful fashion in the not too distant future.
And if that is the case, fundamental changes will be needed in education, supply chains, and national policies for us to use the machines to solve complex problems, panelists said a forum hosted by R Street Institute this week.
"We need ... to prepare people to think about computation in a fundamentally different way," said Chris Fall, senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, during the discussion.
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