Amazon has officially opened the AWS Center for Quantum Computing, a two-story building on the northeast corner of the Caltech campus in Pasadena that both the technology company and the university hope will transform the future of computing. Amazon announced in 2019 it was building the center to “bring together the world’s leading quantum computing researchers and engineers in order to accelerate development of quantum computing hardware and software.” The AWS CQC will be run by Oskar Painter and Fernando Brandao, physics professors on leave from Caltech to help Amazon establish the new facility.

In 2020 Amazon began offering quantum computer access through its AWS cloud services division. Named Amazon Braket (for the bra-ket notation used to denote quantum mechanical states), the managed service allows scientists, researchers, and developers to experiment with computers from third-party quantum hardware providers.

With the opening of the AWS Center for Quantum Computing, Amazon intends to build its own quantum hardware. The Center’s goal is to develop technology to enable quantum computers to be mass-produced, while also identifying applications that are best solved on quantum computers, according to the AWS release.

Such goals could take decades, and to accomplish them in the nascent, costly and competitive world of quantum computing the AWS CQC will need to attract top talent, which the combined resources of Amazon and Caltech should make possible. The Washington Post writes that the Center is the first “corporate-partnership building” on Caltech’s campus (though technically, it is adjacent, built by Amazon on land Caltech is renting to AWS).

“The investment reflects growing corporate interest in quantum computers, which are still at an early stage of development but could someday crack problems that existing computers can’t, such as identifying new materials to capture and remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, or new chemical compounds to treat intractable diseases,” WaPo writes. “In the defense sphere, some scientists believe quantum computers might someday be able to break existing forms of encryption, making them a hot development priority for the United States, China and other nations.”

IBM, Microsoft, Google, Honeywell and IonQ are among the U.S. companies jockeying for position in the quantum computing space. One of the biggest challenges in building a quantum computer is finding quantum objects to act as qubits. These can be naturally occurring, like atoms and photons, or engineered, as with a superconducting circuit.

Another problem is that qubits are highly unstable. They “have the propensity to stop functioning at the slightest disturbance, such as a minor change in temperature,” WaPo notes. But AWS is in it for the long haul, and the combination of Caltech’s braintrust plus Amazon’s deep pockets sounds like a winning formula for scaling up quantum machines.

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China’s New Quantum Computer Has 1 Million Times the Power of Google’s, Interesting Engineering, 10/27/21