Amazon announces initiatives to advance quantum computing technologies

The third initiative is the Amazon Quantum Solutions Lab, a collaborative research program to connect customers with experts in quantum computing, machine learning, and high-performance computing.

Amazon Web Services announced today Amazon Braket, a fully managed AWS service to experiment with quantum computing hardware along with two other key initiatives to help accelerate the development of quantum computing technologies

The all-new Amazon Braket service will provide customers a single development environment to build quantum algorithms, test them on simulated quantum computers from third-party hardware providers including D-Wave, IonQ, and Rigetti, and try them on a range of different quantum hardware architectures, the cloud giant said in a blog post.

In addition, Amazon also announced the development of AWS Center for Quantum Computing, a dedicated center where quantum experts from AWS, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), a world-renowned science and engineering institute and a pioneer in the fields of quantum computation and quantum information, and other leading academic institutions will assemble to research and develop new quantum computing technologies to overcome the long-term technical challenges surrounding the potential technology.

"We believe that quantum computing will be a cloud-first technology and that the cloud will be the main way customers access the hardware. With our Amazon Braket service and Amazon Quantum Solutions Lab, we're making it easier for customers to gain experience using quantum computers and to work with experts from AWS and our partners to figure out how they can benefit from the technology. And with our AWS Center for Quantum Computing and academic partnerships, we join the effort across the scientific and industrial communities to help accelerate the promise of quantum computing.

Charlie Bell, Senior Vice President, Utility Computing Services, AWS

The third initiative is the Amazon Quantum Solutions Lab, a collaborative research program to connect customers with experts in quantum computing, machine learning, and high-performance computing. The program will help organizations explore the potential applications of the futuristic technology for their business, develop their own strategy for quantum computing, build internal expertise, and eventually deploy quantum applications to use it effectively.

Quantum computing technologies are still in the developmental stage with tech giants including Google, IBM, Microsoft, and now Amazon too, competing to achieve quantum supremacy.

To recall, search giant Google recently claimed that it's quantum computer successfully performed a computation in just 200 seconds that would take the world's fastest classical supercomputer approximately 10,000 years to accomplish the equivalent task. But, IBM researchers argued that the term "quantum supremacy" is being broadly misinterpreted and causing ever-growing amounts of confusion. The researchers termed Google's claim as a conservative and worst-case estimate.