Tens of billions in funding will supercharge Quantum Technology

AI startups and technology have been making rapid progress with billions in funding and many companies and researchers making rapid progress. Massive investments are making self-driving cars a reality. Artificial Intelligence has enabled better than human image recognition.

Massive funding and quantum computer advanced to near the quantum supremacy level will be the next frontier for extreme technology competition.

D-Wave Systems received $20 million in additional funding and has talked to Softbanks Vision fund about hundreds of millions in investment. Softbank Vision fund has about $100 billion to invest.

Key quantum components are being miniaturized.

Vastly longer duration quantum entanglement systems will be made possible based on new topological superconducting materials.

D-Wave is working on a 5000 qubit system now and will likely install it with a customer by the end of 2019. They are also working to broaden connectivity on their chips.

D-Wave System announced reverse annealing. Reverse annealing lets programmers start the search for the best solution at a localized spot in solution space. The system will then focus on the area which may be more promising for the best answer. D-Wave enables users to have more control of qubits during the annealing process.

Reverse annealing allows users to start systematic searches for the best answer based on their understanding of the solution space. It circumvents limitations on the number of qubits or the entanglement time by starting new searches in different locations.

Nextbigfuture believes that D-Wave Systems may have already built a 5000 qubit prototype chip.

If D-Wave gets the Softbank Vision funding or other large funding then D-Wave will make a general purpose version of their quantum annealing system.

A few hundred billion dollars from Softbank, China and nearly trillion dollar high technology powerhouses (Google, Amazon, Apple, Alibaba, Tencent, Microsoft and more) will need to bet on high potential technology.

Quantum computing and other quantum technology will clearly be the next thing.

A few hundred million dollars invested to enable D-Wave to have tens of thousands of qubits in a general purpose computing system. Nextxbigfuture believes this to be a no-brainer investment decision.

Powerful Quantum Computing will provide advantages to cloud computing offerings and to AI.

China will also be launching quantum communication satellites and quantum radar systems for military applications.

Predictions

50-100 Qubit general-purpose gate chips in 2018 and 2000 qubit quantum annealing
200-800 Qubit general-purpose gate chips in 2018 and 5000 qubit quantum annealing

Moving beyond 1000 qubits will involve advancements in the quality of qubits and reduction and management of errors.

Pushing to 1000 to 20,000 qubit range by 2020-2021
Millions of qubit systems by end of 2026. There will be a lot of different experiments with qubits and error correction.

Nextbigfuture predicts there will be at least one billion qubit quantum system by the end of 2036.

There will be trillions of dollars from Softbank funds, China funds and the trillion dollar high technology powerhouses (Google, Amazon, Apple, Alibaba, Tencent, Microsoft and more). They will continue to push the competition in quantum and AI technologies to the billion qubit levels and beyond.

There are various approaches to massively scaling quantum systems.

Fully leveraging a conversion of existing transistor based lithography for some complete quantum-enabled technology should be able to achieve billions of qubits in terms of devices on a chip. There would be large issues in terms of getting full entanglement, length of the entanglement and the error correction and error management issues.

There are also potentially highly scalable optical, quantum dot, diamond vacancy and ion approaches.