D-Wave Quantum said its Advantage2 annealing quantum computer is now commercially available and is likely to contribute to revenue growth.
Advantage2 is available via D-Wave's Leap quantum cloud service as well as on-premises deployments. Dr. Alan Baratz, CEO of D-Wave, said the system is a milestone in the company's development and able to "solve hard problems outside the reach of one of the world’s largest exascale GPU-based classical supercomputers."
Quantum annealing is a form of quantum computing that's designed for optimization over general purpose computing. Quantum annealing shines when the goal is to find the best configuration in use cases such as logistics, finance and AI. Critics argue that quantum annealing has limited problem-solving capabilities due a lack of individual qubit control.
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D-Wave is one of the few companies pursuing this approach. Superconducting qubits is seen as the quantum computing variant with the most long-term promise with IBM, Google and Rigetti Computing pursuing that approach. Trapped Ion quantum computing, championed by high fidelity and long coherence time is pushed by IonQ and Quantinuum. Microsoft is pursuing topological quantum computing and QuEra is focused on neutral atoms.
D-Wave's Advantage2 Quantum Processor has 20-way connectivity, 40% increase in energy efficiency and 755 reduction in noise. The company has already been using Advantage2 prototypes via its Leap cloud service since 2022. According the company, D-Wave has run more than 20.6 million customer problems on the system.
The company said Advantage2 has been used by Japan Tobacco, Jülich Supercomputing Center and Los Alamos National Laboratory. In the first quarter, D-Wave reported $15 million in revenue, up 509% from a year ago. Of that sales total, $12.6 million was the sale of an Advantage2 system to Jülich Supercomputing Center. D-Wave reported a first quarter net loss of $5.4 million with a cash balance of more than $304 million.
Speaking on D-Wave's earnings conference call, Baratz said there's bias against D-Wave's annealing approach compared to the rest of the world. He said there is a lot of interest in Advantage2 in governments and supercomputing centers globally, but "frankly less so in the US."
He added:
"There is a strong gate model bias in the US Government. That is something that we are working hard to address. And we're making incremental progress, but we are not there yet. We believe it's a huge mistake on the part of the US Government because frankly, other governments around the world are looking at quantum computing to help solve important hard problems today, recognizing that annealing can do that while gate model can. And the US, in my view, admittedly somewhat biased, is falling way behind on this and really needs to get that sorted out.
I would not say that we're seeing a lot of interest from the US Government in system sales at this point in time."
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Nevertheless, Baratz said Advantage2 will be able to solve problems in optimization, AI and material science. An Advantage2 annealing quantum system is complete at Davidson Technology in Huntsville, Alabama and currently going through calibration and readiness testing.
D-Wave has other potential Advantage2 systems to sell in the pipeline, but Baratz said there are long lead times. D-Wave just completed its first system sale in the first quarter.
Baratz said:
"System sales tend to take time. And so, while we have a handful that we are working on and some maybe sooner than others, these are long lead sales opportunities. So, it will take us some time to get there. But we're encouraged by the level of interest based on, in part, the supremacy resolve and the demonstration of capabilities that the system has when you're able to control more of the operating parameters than possible through the quantum cloud service."
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