I don't really understand how quantum chips work, but it's so interesting and cool (or it's not)
Interesting. My observation on IBM is their entire business model is:<p>1 - Audit your customers<p>2 - Buy back shares<p>3 - Force early retirements<p>It was easy to see why Watson failed in that environment. The revenue was “We’ll let you out of the $6mm audit bill if you buy $2mm of Watson”. Companies would agree, install better asset management, and never put Watson into production.<p>I couldn’t imagine Quantum Comouting surviving there. Spinning it off the best play.
Seems like tacit acknowledgment that IBM mothership is not the right place for a speculative growth play from both a management and capital perspective.<p>I’m not IBMologist but I do remember how IBM pushed Watson when it was clear that upper management had no idea what Watson actually was. Regardless of the viability of the underlying technology, it’s best to keep such things away from the consultants.<p>Also, article is very difficult to read. Bad typeface, spacing, coherence and prose. I found the press release less strained.<p><a href="https://newsroom.ibm.com/ibm-and-u-s-department-of-commerce-announce-americas-first-purpose-built-quantum-foundry" rel="nofollow">https://newsroom.ibm.com/ibm-and-u-s-department-of-commerce-...</a>
> <i>Seems like tacit acknowledgment that IBM mothership is not the right place for a speculative growth play from both a management and capital perspective.</i><p>I'm not understanding your logic, can you explain?<p>What I see with the program and amounts companies were awarded is some level of acknowledgment of the current state of quantum research (i.e. IBM is generally considered the leader) and their pragmatic approach that piggy-backs on current technologies (for obvious speed+cost benefits).
> IBM is generally considered the leader<p>You must not talk to competent people. IBM is very experienced at this grift. I remember when I used to go to conferences in a different field and IBM would announce "state of the art" results that were very obviously done by cheating (making an ensemble model and tuning the weights on the test set). Everyone doing real work would ignore them, and then they'd go sell to clueless midcap companies on the basis of that announcement.
I remember when watson was touted as soon to be replacement for doctors more than 10 years ago…<p><a href="https://www.henricodolfing.ch/en/case-study-20-the-4-billion-ai-failure-of-ibm-watson-for-oncology/" rel="nofollow">https://www.henricodolfing.ch/en/case-study-20-the-4-billion...</a>
Well ya, it’s an Indian IT sweatshop at this point.
This is a pro-IBM piece.<p>I'm surprised it has zero mention of potential advantages of trapped ion despite being superior on stability windows, accuracy, and operating temps.<p>I also appreciate the disclosure about AI generated content, but this article gets too repetitive.
The real story isn't the $2B. It's that the foundry is standalone, so other quantum hardware companies can use it. Shared infrastructure beats nine separate research cleanrooms.
First? Europeans are already producing quantum processors at research scale, soon industrial scale.<p><a href="https://quantware.com/news/quantware-raises-178-million" rel="nofollow">https://quantware.com/news/quantware-raises-178-million</a>
I am not surprised, but disappointed, to see something like the CHIPS Act be used for something which is still in ultra-super-unbelievably-early-research-phase. Put more candidly, something not currently useful like Quantum computing.<p>Looks like just a handout to IBM.
Can the chips they plan to make there run Shor?
From the article:<p>>IBM is developing four custom ASICs — a decoder, a two-qubit gate controller, a single-qubit controller, and an amplifier — designed to handle quantum control at scale, with these circuits expected to converge around 2029 at the point where power consumption becomes manageable at up to 3 megawatts per system.<p>The current hotness seems to be based on creating pairs of entangled qubits based on what might be realistically achieved with error correction. Shor's requires thousands of entangled qubits (something like 4000 for 2K RSA and 1500 for 256 bit elliptic curves).<p>So unless someone comes up with a way to break cryptography using pairs of entangled qubits then this probably isn't relevant.
If they could in any meaningful way, i'm pretty sure the press release would have lead with that.
IBM is such a weird company what even IS IBM these days?<p>For the most part it seems to be rent-a-programmer “consulting”.<p>But then articles like this come up where they seem to still have research capability.<p>They bailed out of pc hardware long ago, do they still do mainframes - maybe mainframes don’t exist any more?
IBM still sells extremely <i>POWER</i>ful systems, but they don't seem particularly interested in expanding the market.<p>I once had a conversation with a director of that division about why it wasn't on the market. It basically came down to the existing customers being willing to pay such exorbitant amounts for each system after all the support contracts that "normal" markups like Nvidia and Intel enjoy were too paltry in comparison.
A bailout for a company that stopped innovating and instead has been inventing new ways to create middle management and bureaucracy.<p>So much for capitalism.
Two questions:<p>-do the chips help with inference?<p>-can you run Doom on the chips?
The article talks about IBM spreading bets to other techniques. Reminds me to ponder again. Has Microsoft retracted their sketchy quantum claims about inventing new states of matter in the past year? <a href="https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2025/03/12/microsofts-quantum-breakthrough-claim-labeled-unreliable/664284" rel="nofollow">https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2025/03/12/microsofts-qu...</a>
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