Quantum computing startup IonQ today announced its road map for the next few years — following a similar move from IBM in September — and it’s quite ambitious, to say the least.
At our Disrupt event earlier this year, IonQ CEO and president Peter Chapman suggested that we were only five years away from having desktop quantum computers. That’s not something you’ll likely hear from the company’s competitors — who also often use a very different kind of quantum technology — but IonQ now says that it will be able to sell modular, rack-mounted quantum computers for the data center in 2023 and that by 2025, its systems will be powerful enough to achieve broad quantum advantage across a wide variety of use cases.
In an interview ahead of today’s announcement, Chapman showed me a prototype of the hardware the company is working on for 2021, which fits on a workbench. The actual quantum chip is currently the size of a half-dollar and the company is now working on essentially putting the core of its technology on a single chip, with all of the optics that make its system work integrated.