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IonQ, a quantum computing startup born in College Park, announced Monday that it would likely soon become the first publicly traded company to specialize in commercialized quantum computing.

The company plans to file paperwork with the Securities Exchange Commission in the next week, which will allow it to go public on the New York Stock Exchange through an acquisition deal that would set the valuation of the combined entity to nearly $2 billion.

The ability to become a public company gives us access to a huge capital base, and that will allow us to spend more time building our system, deploying them for useful application, said Chris Monroe, IonQs founder and a physics professor at the University of Maryland. We can start to do our own research and development We can do more risky things.

Monroe and co-founder Junsang Kim formed IonQ with the goal of taking quantum computing into the market. They initially received $2 million in seed funding from New Enterprise Associates, giving them a license to lab technology from the University of Maryland and Duke University. From there, they were able to raise tens of millions of dollars in funding from companies like Samsung and Mubadala, and partnered with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft.

[Gov. Hogan names College Park quantum computing company one of top state start-ups]

The company going public was made possible by a planned merger with a blank-check firm, dMY Technology Group Inc. III.

If it goes through, the merger will result in over $650 million in gross proceeds, including $350 million from private investors, according to a press release from IonQ. Combined with the $84 million the company has raised in venture capital funding, the deal would place IonQs total earnings at about $734 million.

The transition to quantum computing is unprecedented, Monroe said, and it will allow people to solve problems that a regular computer often cant.

Some problems like optimizing a fleet of trucks or discovering medicines have too many variables to solve with regular computing. But at the quantum level, more information can be handled, Monroe said, making it radically different from todays computing.

University President Darryll Pines, formerly the dean of the engineering school, explained that classical computing uses a stream of electrical pulses called bits, which represent 1s and 0s, to store information. However, on the quantum scale, subatomic particles known as qubits are used to store information, greatly increasing the speed of computing.

IonQs approach to researching quantum computing has been rooted in university-led research. Quantum physics has strange rules that arent always accepted in the engineering world, Monroe said, so many of these laws have become the domain of research at universities and national laboratories.

And this university especially, with its proximity to Washington, D.C., has one of the biggest communities of quantum scientists, Monroe said.

We have students and postdocs and all kinds of researchers on Marylands campus studying the field, and at IonQ, weve hired many of them, Monroe said. And thats a huge advantage for us.

As a company with about 60 employees, some of whom attended this university, IonQ has become a pioneer in quantum computing. In October, Peter Chapman, IonQs CEO and president, announced the companys newest 32-qubit computer, the most powerful quantum computer on the market.

And in November, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan named IonQ one of the states top 20 startup companies in the state.

[Women of color in UMD community are making it as entrepreneurs despite challenges]

The biggest advantage for IonQ has been its technology, Monroe said. Companies like IBM, Google or Microsoft use silicon to build their computers but IonQ uses individual atoms, which, unlike silicon, float over a chip in a vacuum chamber.

That technology has been perfected at this university, Monroe said, and IonQ has a concrete plan over the next five years to manufacture quantum computer modules and wire them together.

By 2030, 20 percent of global organizations whether in the public or private sector are expected to budget for quantum-computing projects, according to Gartner Inc., a global research and advisory firm. That number is up from less than 1 percent in 2018, according to Gartner.

Niccolo de Masi, CEO of dMY, said in IonQs press release that he expects the quantum computing industry to grow immensely in the next ten years, with a market opportunity of approximately $65 billion by 2030.

Pines expressed his excitement at seeing a university startup make strides in computing.

Were happy for building the ecosystem from science, to translation, to startup, to possibly developing a product and adding value to society and growing jobs in the state of Maryland, Pines said.

See the article here:
After merger, College Park startup IonQ plans to go public with $2 billion valuation - The Diamondback

A department overseen by European Union research commissioner Mariya Gabriel wants to safeguard strategic research by barring non-EU researchers.

By Nicholas WallaceMar. 11, 2021 , 4:25 PM

In a sign of growing national tensions over the control of strategic research, the European Commission is trying to block countries outside the European Union from participating in quantum computing and space projects under Horizon Europe, its new research funding program.

The proposed calls, which must still be approved by delegates from the 27 EU member states in the coming weeks, would shut out researchers in countries accustomed to full access to European research programs, including Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Israel. European Economic Area (EEA) countries Norway, Lichtenstein, and Iceland would be barred from space research calls while remaining eligible for quantum computing projects.

Research advocates see the proposed restrictions as self-defeating for all parties, including the European Union. It would be a classic lose-lose, with researchers in all countries having to work harder, and spend more, to make progress in these fields, says Vivienne Stern, director of UK Universities International. The unexpected news has upset some leaders of existing collaborations and left them scrambling to find out whether they will need to exclude partnersor even drop out themselvesif they want their projects to be eligible for further funding. It is really a pity because we have a tight and fruitful relationship with our partners in the U.K., says Sandro Mengali, director of the Italian research nonprofit Consorzio C.R.E.O. and coordinator of an EU-funded project developing heat shields for spacecraft.

In 2018, when the European Commission first announced plans for the 85 billion, 7-year Horizon Europe program, it said it would beopen to the world. Switzerland, Israel, the EEA nations, and other countries have long paid toassociate with EU funding programs like Horizon Europegiving their researchers the right to apply for grants, just like those in EU member states. After leaving the European Union,the United Kingdom struck a dealin December 2020 to join Horizon Europe, which put out its first grant calls last month through the European Research Council.

But more recently,strategic autonomy andtechnological sovereignty have become watchwords among policymakers in Brussels, who argue the European Union should domestically produce components in key technologies, such as quantum computers and space technology. Those views influenced the Commissions research policy department, overseen by EU research commissioner Mariya Gabriel, which drafted the calls and their eligibility rules,first revealed by Science|Business. The draft says the restrictions are necessary tosafeguard the Unions strategic assets, interests, autonomy, or security.

Its a bit of a contradiction, says a Swiss government official who asked to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of forthcoming discussions.You want to open the program to the world and work with the best. But the core group of associated countries with whom youre used to working, suddenly you exclude them and force them to work with the competitors. The official says the Commission gave no warnings the proposal was coming but believes the combination of Brexit and the COVID-19 crisis, in which Europe has struggled to secure access to vaccines, masks, and other equipment, may have further spurred Europe to guard its technologies. Negotiations on Swiss membership in Horizon Europe have not begun, but the country intends to join.

The restrictions affect 170 million in funding that could be available in the next few months. The affected areas include quantum computing, quantum communications, satellite communications, space transport, launchers, andspace technologies for European non-dependence and competitiveness. Projects relating to the Copernicus Earth-observation system and the Galileo satellite navigation programs would remain largely open to associated countries.

Shutting out the associated countries would be alost opportunity and could slow progress in quantum computing, says Lieven Vandersypen, a quantum nanoscientist at the Delft University of Technology.To me, it doesnt make sense. Vandersypen contributes to an EU-funded project that is investigating how to create the basic bits of a quantum computer from cheap and readily available silicon. The project includes U.K. and Swiss researchers at University College London and the University of Basel.They are in there for a good reason, Vandersypen says.They bring in really valuable expertise. With a few years left on the grant, the project isn't in any immediate danger. But the exclusions are bad for long-term planning, Vandersypen says.

Non-EU researchers working on a 150 million European quantum flagship initiative set up in 2018 are also upset by the sudden reversal and wonder about their future status. We discuss with our partners in Europe, they ask us, Can you join?And we dont knowthats probably the worst thing, says Hugo Zbinden, a quantum physicist at the University of Geneva and coordinator of one of these flagship projects, QRANGE, which is investigating how a quantum random number generator can be used to improve encryption.

The restrictions are not yet set in stone; national delegates could reject the draft calls and ask the Commission to open them up. But member states accepted the legal basis for the restrictions last year, when they agreed to the Horizon Europe legislation.Of course, you hope that we will be in, Zbinden says. For the time being, we are waiting for some news.

More here:
Europe moves to exclude neighbors from its quantum and space research - Science Magazine

As per Open AI data, the amount of computational power needed to train large AI models has grown massively doubling every three and a half months since 2021. GPT-3, which requires 3.14E23 FLOPS of computing for training, is a good case in point.

Typically, to carry out high-performance computing tasks, conventional AI chips are equipped with transistors that work with electrons. Although they perform a wide array of complex high performing tasks, energy consumption and engineering glitches pose a challenge. Thus, the growing need for computing power has set researchers on a quest to find a workaround to boost these chips power without increasing energy consumption.

And thats when experts turned to photons and light particles that can easily substitute electrons in AI chips to reduce the heat, leading to a massive reduction in energy consumption and a dramatic upgrade in processor speed.

While electrons perform calculations by reducing the information to a series of 1s and 0s, photonic chips split and mix beams of light within tiny channels to carry out the tasks. Compared to regular AI chips, photonics chips are only designed to perform a certain kind of mathematical calculation, critical for running large AI models.

Lightmatter, an MIT-backed startup, last year developed an AI chip Envise that leverages photons (light particles) to perform computing tasks.

Lights travel faster than electrons. The concept of using light as a substitute for carrying out heavy tasks (aka photonics computing/optical computing) dates back to the 1980s, when Nokia Bell Labs, an American industrial research and scientific development company, tried to develop a light-based processor. However, due to the impracticality of creating a working optical transistor, the concept didnt take off.

We experience optical technology in cameras, CDs, and even in Blue-Ray discs. But these photons are usually converted into electrons to deploy in chips. Four decades later, photonic computing gained momentum when IBM and researchers from the University of Oxford Muenster developed the system that uses light instead of electricity to perform several AI model-based computations.

Alongside, Lightmatters new AI chip has created a buzz in the industry. According to the company website, Envise can run the largest neural networks three times higher inferences/second than the Nvidia DGX-A100, with seven times the inferences/second/Watt on BERT-Base with the SQuAD dataset.

Japan-based NTT company has also been developing an optical computer believed to outpace quantum computing to solve optimisation problems. Last year, Chinese quantum physicist, Chao-Yang Lu, has also announced light-based quantum computing.

Other companies like US-based Honeywell and IonQ have also been working around the issue by using trapped ions.

Such developments have led the experts to believe photonics computing will gain ground once the big tech companies throw their weight behind it and understand the importance of using light for their AI chips.

On the other hand, like any other remarkable technology, photonics computing also comes with certain challenges. Despite its less energy-consumption, photons chips are considered less accurate and precise than electron-based chips. Much of this could be attributed to its analogue-based calculations, making it perfect for running pre-trained models and deep neural networks.

On the designing aspect, silicon-based computer chips dont go well with photo particles that limit their usage in computing.

The cost issues and environmental impact of digital chips might set the stage for photonics computing to rise as a substitute. With startups like Lightmatter and giants like IBM committing resources to this computing paradigm, AI might get a photonic boost.

Read the rest here:
Can Photonic Computing Solve The Rising Cost & Energy Issues Of AI? - Analytics India Magazine