IBM Races to Commercialize Quantum Computing Within Three Years as Intel Expands Research

SILICON VALLEY — Traditional big tech companies that lost momentum during Nvidia's dominance are redrawing the competitive map, betting that quantum computing will reach commercial use within three years. They appear to be closing in on solutions to error correction and cryogenic cooling, the biggest obstacles to commercializing the technology.

IBM researchers have unveiled a method called spacetime probabilistic error cancellation, which combines quantum error detection with error mitigation, and verified its performance on IBM Aachen, an actual superconducting quantum processor, according to The Quantum Insider on the 20th.

One of the biggest weaknesses of quantum computers is that errors occur frequently during calculations because of the nature of quantum states. Until now, mitigation techniques that minimize errors and detection-and-correction techniques that screen them out entirely have been developed separately. IBM says combining the two approaches can screen out up to 65% of errors in advance.

Intel is likewise focusing on commercialization through error minimization. "Right now I'm focused on error correction and applications. I also think about who is going to pay for it," Intel Chief Executive Lip-Bu Tan said in a keynote address at DotConf26 in Denver, Colorado, on the 15th. The remarks pointed to a stage of trial and error before full-scale use, rather than immediate realization of quantum computing.