Nearly two years after announcing its quantum computing initiative, AWS announced this week that it has partnered with the California Institute of Technology to establish the AWS Center for Quantum Computing as a research and development base, fully committing to quantum computing research.
The AWS quantum computing center is located on the Caltech campus in Pasadena, California, covering 21,000 square feet (approximately 590 ping), and will be used by AWS to produce and test quantum processors, drive innovation in quantum computer control processes, and experiment with technologies supporting larger quantum devices, such as cryogenic cooling systems and plumbing. Scholars from the institute, including John G Braun Professor of Applied Physics Oskar Painter and Bren Professor of Theoretical Physics Fernando Brandao, will also serve as leaders of the center. Additionally, renowned scholars from the University of Washington, Stanford, and MIT will collaborate with AWS on quantum technology development.
Intellectual property developed at the center will belong to Amazon, but IP generated by Caltech in research projects sponsored by Amazon will belong to the university. Some technologies will have intellectual property jointly held by both parties.
Nadia Carlsten, product lead for the AWS computing center, explained the center's research direction. She pointed out that AWS's quantum center will focus on superconducting qubits, which are circuit elements made of superconducting materials. AWS's rationale is that using mature microelectronics manufacturing technology to produce qubits helps in repeatedly producing multiple qubits and offers better control. Additionally, superconducting qubits have extremely fast quantum gates, which could give future quantum computers faster clock speeds, accelerating computation and problem-solving.
AWS is taking two approaches to reduce quantum error rates. One is to improve quantum computer materials to reduce quantum noise, and the other is to use Quantum Error Correction (QEC) technology. Typical QEC requires a large number of physical qubits to encode quantum logical information, but AWS is researching quantum architectures to simplify the engineering. AWS uses linear harmonic oscillators and has recently proposed a fault-tolerant quantum computer theoretical design incorporating "Schrödinger's cat" qubits.
She further explained that AWS uses physical qubits to significantly suppress bit flip errors, and then uses error-biasing to detect phase-flip errors, aiming to produce logical qubits with very low error rates that can be used to store and control encoded quantum information. This design also simplifies hardware requirements and enhances scalability.
The AWS Center for Quantum Computing is currently able to manufacture several logical qubits. One of the team's short-term goals is to improve the accuracy of logical qubits beyond that of physical qubits, with the ultimate goal of enabling this error-corrected quantum computer to perform stable computations.
Research at Caltech will be able to combine AWS's own hardware or the Amazon Braket quantum computing service, which AWS collaborates on with IonQ, Rigetti, and D-Wave Systems. AWS told the media that it will continue to seek new hardware, not just promote hardware developed internally by AWS to customers.
