DARPA begins scaling a quantum computer with 15 companies

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency unveiled the first set of tech companies selected to participate in its Quantum Benchmarking Initiative as the U.S. government continues to investigate which scientific path will bring a fault-tolerant quantum computer to life. 

Announced on April 3, 15 companies focused on quantum computing will work with DARPA researchers to scale their technology with one common goal: creating a utility scale quantum computer. An additional three companies are still in contract negotiations. 

Joe Altpeter, the program manager of DARPA's Defense Sciences Office, told Nextgov/FCW that the initiative is broken up into three stages, each with specific milestones that a given company’s technology must meet to advance.

“We really have built this to be an increasingly robust, increasingly deep evaluation,” Altpeter said. “There’s like 12 different technologies that are competing for this.”

While there is some overlap in how the 15 participating companies anticipate bringing a cryptographically-relevant quantum computer to life — such as superconducting qubits, neutral atoms, trapped ions and photonics — each company employs these techniques differently to transmit data in superposition, a key feature of quantum computing.

Including this diverse array of companies is part of DARPA’s broader goal to track multiple avenues for quantum supremacy. 

When asked which method will be the likely winner of the initiative, Altpeter said that his inability to answer that question is the entire point of DARPA’s program.

“There's no reason to believe that the systems that even the winning company has today are going to look anything like the systems that they need to win this race 10 years from now, 20 years [from now],” he said. “That's really what we're trying to do in the Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, is do that deep technical dive and deep technical due diligence.”

Altpeter added that they aim to figure out what they should be tracking now in order to get to that system that will change the world in 10 years.

Participants within the Quantum Benchmarking Initiative begin in Stage A, which launches a six-month tech sprint focused on deliverables. The sprint will consist of three evaluations: explaining use cases, identifying weak links in scaling procedures and answering a final evaluation featuring 60 questions that will dictate if a company’s system advances.

“We ask them: ‘Which system eventually do you think is really going to start to be industrially useful, which is the one where you're really going to start making money on this technology? Why do you think that, what does that system need to do?’” Altpeter said. 

He said that despite the relatively short timeframe of six months, Stage A’s parameters will offer researchers a good idea of what technologies should move on to Stage B in the next 12 months.

The first participating companies in Stage A include:

• Alice & Bob
• Atlantic Quantum 
• Atom Computing 
• Diraq 
• Hewlett Packard Enterprise 
• IBM
• IonQ 
• Nord Quantique 
• Oxford Ionics
• Photonic Inc. 
• Quantinuum 
• Quantum Motion 
• Rigetti Computing 
• Silicon Quantum Computing Pty. Ltd.
• Xanadu 

DARPA has explored the science needed for viable quantum computing as well as its applications for several years now, with scalability always being a leading priority. Along with the companies included in the Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, the agency is working with Microsoft and PsiQuantum in a similar collaboration to examine their quantum computing methodology in greater detail.