Nobel winner, HPE and chip industry firms team up to make a practical quantum supercomputer

By Stephen Nellis

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -John M. Martinis, one of this year’s winners of the Nobel Prize in physics for breakthroughs in quantum computing, on Monday formed an alliance with HPE and several chip firms to create a practical, mass-producible quantum supercomputer.

Quantum computers hold the promise of solving problems in chemistry, medicine and other fields that would take classical computers thousands of years.

Major tech firms such as IBM, Microsoft and Alphabet’s Google, where Martinis worked before co-founding his current startup Qolab, are all racing to develop the technology.

But those efforts are largely one-offs, being built one computer at a time by small teams. The new group, called the Quantum Scaling Alliance, aims to build quantum computers that can be made