Equal1, an Irish quantum semiconductor company announced this week it had raised $60 million to fuel the next stage of development, with a two year plan for growth including that of its current six qubit model to 100 qubits, and adding new customers to its roster of which the European Space Agency (ESA) currently tops.
The round was led by the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund (ISIF), with participation from Atlantic Bridge, the European Innovation Council Fund, Matterwave Ventures, Enterprise Ireland, Elkstone and TNO Ventures.
“We’re turning quantum from bespoke hardware into deployable infrastructure – positioning Equal1 as the quantum standard for HPC,” says Equal1’s CEO Jason Lynch.
Curious to find out more about how this quantum tech can work with existing systems and where it might fit in the future, Resilience Media sat down with Lynch to ask all the normal human questions.
Quantum computing has been talked about for years, there is no doubt it is coming but can it be understood? It’s certainly a subject I have tried to avoid through sheer ignorance, until now. Is it becoming more palatable to the average person?
“I think our job, in a way, is to abstract the complexity away, so that people, when they look at this in five years, find this is just another way of compute. Our hope would be you will have a CPU (central processing unit), a GPU (graphics processing unit) and a QPU (quantum processing unit) and depending on the workload, you’ll send it to that. This will be an extension of what we have – it’ll be coded in a way that it’s coded today, as simple as Python.”
“I think the challenge that we’re in right now is we’re in this inflection point where we’re going from physics and the science lab to commercial reality, and it seems very daunting, and it seems like there’s a whole lot of quantum PhD people that are needed here – but we also need to make it usable by the masses and usable by any developer, right?”
Right! Lynch says it has to become something that is “not scary” and that you don’t need to to have a “theoretical physics PhD to even scratch the surface”.
Equal1’s first product is the Bell·1 (named after Belfast born John Stuart Bell, a founding father of quantum, the originator of Bell’s Theorem). Bell·1 is a rack-mounted quantum server for standard datacenter environments – claiming it arrives on wheels, you plug it in and it starts computing. The product is on the market and can be found in ESA’s Space HPC Centre in Italy.
Starting with the six qubits (quantum bit) product today, which Lynch says can do “benchmarks, and academic quantum experiments or very small algorithms,” the plan that the funding will allow for, is to scale the model up to 100 qubits in the next two years.
“At that point, we’ll be able to show what’s called error correction – these qubits are extremely difficult to control, you want to error correct them, to remove the errors,” he explains. “It’s similar to what Google showed with their Willow chip but the difference is we have scale built in. We’re on a platform that doesn’t need any development for us to go from those hundreds to thousands to millions in five to six years.”
And this is the expectation of customers who are investing in the Bell-1 quantum server, it’s the beginning of the journey that Equal1 claims will take them to quantum advantage.
“What you’ll see from us is proof that this is the platform to scale, a proof that we’re going to be part of the conversation in terms of what quantum computing companies are going to drive this forward, and also milestones and announcements on the customer side that will show that we’re we’re bringing customers on a journey here from where we are today to quantum advantage in their application,” says Lynch.
There is a hope that quantum could eventually help to solve the energy crisis. Could the future of computing cost as much as plugging in a household appliance?
“When we have 50 very high quality qubits, that will be equal to the biggest supercomputer in the world today – those 50 qubits can be done on a standard plug that you would plug your hair dryer or Hoover or whatever into,” explains Lynch. “Maybe that gives an indication as to what the level of change will be in the level of savings in terms of energy.”
Of course we couldn’t let Lynch go without asking if we might see Equal1 in the defence realm anytime soon.
“I think we have our plate full with the three big areas we want to focus on, which are, AI, material science/material simulation and optimisation – so defence isn’t a focus for us at the present time,” he says.
“We’d certainly have a conversation. I mean, we’d be crazy not to. It’s obviously a sensitive topic in Ireland but look we need to not be naive. We’re at the edge of Europe, we’re the first line of defence and we’ve got a lot of infrastructure along the Atlantic so I think Ireland needs not to be naive in this discussion. But for us, we’re focused on those three verticals,” he adds.
