Everyone in quantum computing agrees that error correction will be the key to doing a broad range of useful calculations. But early every company in the field seems to have a different vision of how best to get there. Almost all of their plans share a key feature: some variation on logical qubits built by linking together multiple hardware qubits.

A key exception is Nord Quantique, which aims to dramatically cut the amount of hardware needed to support an error-corrected quantum computer. It does this by putting enough quantum states into a single piece of hardware, allowing each of those pieces to hold an error-corrected qubit. Last week, the company shared results showing that it could make hardware that used photons at two different frequencies to successfully identify every case where a logical qubit lost its state.

That still doesn't provide error correction, and they didn't use the logical qubit to perform operations. But it's an important validation of the company's approach.

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Microsoft is updating Windows 11 with a set of new encryption algorithms that can withstand future attacks from quantum computers in a move aimed at jump-starting what’s likely to be the most formidable and important technology transition in modern history.

Computers that are based on the physics of quantum mechanics don’t yet exist outside of sophisticated labs, but it’s well-established science that they eventually will. Instead of processing data in the binary state of zeros and ones, quantum computers run on qubits, which encompass myriad states all at once. This new capability promises to bring about new discoveries of unprecedented scale in a host of fields, including metallurgy, chemistry, drug discovery, and financial modeling.

Averting the cryptopocalypse

One of the most disruptive changes quantum computing will bring is the breaking of some of the most common forms of encryption, specifically, the RSA cryptosystem and those based on elliptic curves. These systems are the workhorses that banks, governments, and online services around the world have relied on for more than four decades to keep their most sensitive data confidential. RSA and elliptic curve encryption keys securing web connections would require millions of years to be cracked using today’s computers. A quantum computer could crack the same keys in a matter of hours or minutes.

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The world of computers is dominated by binary. Silicon transistors are either conducting or they're not, and so we've developed a whole world of math and logical operations around those binary capabilities. And, for the most part, quantum computing has been developing along similar lines, using qubits that, when measured, will be found in one of two states.

In some cases, the use of binary values is a feature of the object being used to hold the qubit. For example, a technology called dual-rail qubits takes its value from which of two linked resonators holds a photon. But there are many other quantum objects that have access to far more than two states—think of something like all the possible energy states an electron could occupy when orbiting an atom. We can use things like this as qubits by only relying on the lowest two energy levels. But there's nothing stopping us from using more than two.

In Wednesday's issue of Nature, researchers describe creating qudits, the generic term for systems that hold quantum information—it's short for quantum digits. Using a system that can be in three or four possible states (qutrits and ququarts, respectively), they demonstrate the first error correction of higher-order quantum memory.

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Israeli quantum computing startup Classiq has landed $110 million in Series C funding, the largest ever for a quantum software company. The latest round brings its total haul to $173 million since launch five years ago. The round was led […]

The post Israeli startup Classiq raises $110M in funding to become the ‘Microsoft of quantum computing’ first appeared on Tech Startups.

Quantum computing has long been announced as “just around the corner,” but several companies are now determined to make this a commercial reality, with the promise of solving complex problems beyond classical computers’ reach. The problems in question are wide-ranging, from medicine and cybersecurity to materials science and chemistry. But first, there are very practical […]

It’s been difficult to find important questions that quantum computers can answer faster than classical machines, but a new algorithm appears to do so for some critical optimization tasks.

Concerns about AI's energy use have a lot of people looking into ways to cut down on its power requirements. Many of these focus on hardware and software approaches that are pretty straightforward extensions of existing technologies. But a few technologies are much farther out there. One that's definitely in the latter category? Quantum computing.

In some ways, quantum hardware is a better match for some of the math that underlies AI than more traditional hardware. While the current quantum hardware is a bit too error-prone for the more elaborate AI models currently in use, researchers are starting to put the pieces in place to run AI models when the hardware is ready. This week, a couple of commercial interests are releasing a draft of a paper describing how to get classical image data into a quantum processor (actually, two different processors) and perform a basic AI image classification.

All of which gives us a great opportunity to discuss why quantum AI may be more than just hype.

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nEye Systems, an AI chip startup spun out of research at UC Berkeley, has raised $58 million in fresh funding to tackle one of the biggest challenges facing AI data centers: energy efficiency and flexibility. The round was led by […]

The post AI chip startup NEye Systems raises $58M to power energy-efficient data centers with optical chips, led by Alphabet’s CapitalG first appeared on Tech Startups.

As AI models get bigger and more power-hungry, data centers struggle to keep up. The cost of training and running large language models (LLMs) keeps climbing, and silicon chips are hitting performance limits. With U.S. data center energy use expected […]

The post Lumai, an Oxford spinout and AI accelerator startup, raises $10M+ to cut AI compute costs with optical acceleration first appeared on Tech Startups.

The rabbit hole of quantum gets weirder the deeper you go—but also has plenty of promise.

The sudden success of Chinese AI startup DeepSeek in January caught tech leaders by surprise, triggering over $1 trillion in the U.S. tech market crash. Now, policymakers in Washington are stepping in, aiming to slow China’s momentum in artificial intelligence and […]

The post U.S. blacklists over 50 Chinese tech companies to curb China’s AI and quantum advancements first appeared on Tech Startups.

Quantum computing startup PsiQuantum is raising at least $750 million in a new funding round that could value the company at $6 billion pre-money, Reuters reported, citing two people familiar with the matter. One of them said BlackRock is leading […]

The post Quantum startup PsiQuantum to raise $750 million in BlackRock-led funding round first appeared on Tech Startups.

Right now, quantum computers are small and error-prone compared to where they'll likely be in a few years. Even within those limitations, however, there have been regular claims that the hardware can perform in ways that are impossible to match with classical computation (one of the more recent examples coming just last year). In most cases to date, however, those claims were quickly followed by some tuning and optimization of classical algorithms that boosted their performance, making them competitive once again.

Today, we have a new entry into the claims department—or rather a new claim by an old entry. D-Wave is a company that makes quantum annealers, specialized hardware that is most effective when applied to a class of optimization problems. The new work shows that the hardware can track the behavior of a quantum system called an Ising model far more efficiently than any of the current state-of-the-art classical algorithms.

Knowing what will likely come next, however, the team behind the work writes, "We hope and expect that our results will inspire novel numerical techniques for quantum simulation."

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Celestial AI, a Silicon Valley chip startup aiming to overcome speed limitations in artificial intelligence, announced on Tuesday that it has secured an additional $250 million in a Series C1 funding round. This brings its total funding to $515 million. […]

The post Celestial AI raises $250 million to speed up connections between AI chips and transform AI Infrastructure first appeared on Tech Startups.

TechCrunch will be on the ground at SXSW 2025 — the annual tech, music, comedy, and film conference that kicked off Friday in Austin — in search of the zeitgeist of this AI-centric era. Yup, we’re one sentence in and AI has already made its entrance. And why not? A quick scan of the massive […]

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Big Tech companies aren’t sleeping on quantum chips: Amazon Web Services introduced Ocelot; Microsoft, Majorana; and Google, Willow. But although all of these can be considered to be breakthroughs, quantum startups often focus on more practical advancements — and they are making progress. Founded in 2020, Dutch startup QuantWare is one of these, which claims […]

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Austrian startup Quantum Industries has raised $10 million to bring its cybersecurity technology to market, aiming to protect critical infrastructure from cyber threats and the looming risks of quantum computing. The funding round was led by Sparring Capital Partners and […]

The post Austrian startup Quantum Industries raises $10M to secure critical infrastructure from cyberattacks and quantum threats first appeared on Tech Startups.

Amazon just revealed its first quantum computing chip, Ocelot, marking a step forward in its push to develop large-scale quantum systems. Developed by the AWS Center for Quantum Computing in Pasadena, California, the chip marks a key move in Amazon’s […]

The post Amazon unveils Ocelot: Its first quantum chip in the race for practical quantum computing first appeared on Tech Startups.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has introduced Ocelot, its first quantum computing chip. The news brings it into line with its big cloud rivals Microsoft and Google, which have also unveiled their own quantum chips in recent months, respectively Majorana and Willow. The cloud computing giant has long been investing in the quantum computing space, starting […]

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Following up on Microsoft's announcement of a qubit based on completely new physics, Amazon is publishing a paper describing a very different take on quantum computing hardware. The system mixes two different types of qubit hardware to improve the stability of the quantum information they hold. The idea is that one type of qubit is resistant to errors, while the second can be used for implementing an error-correction code that catches the problems that do happen.

While there have been more effective demonstrations of error correction in the past, a number of companies are betting that Amazon's general approach is the best route to getting logical qubits that are capable of complex algorithms. So, in that sense, it's an important proof of principle.

Herding cats

The basic idea behind Amazon's approach is to use one type of qubit to hold data and a second to enable error correction. The data qubit is extremely resistant to one type of error, but prone to a second. Those errors are where the second type of qubit comes in; it's used to run an error-correction code that's effective at picking up the problems the data qubits are prone to. Combined, the two are hoped to allow error correction to be handled by far fewer hardware qubits.

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