Today’s Brief Commentary:
I’m back from London and the Economist Impact 4th Annual Commercialising Quantum conference. I also took a two-day mini-holiday in Liverpool to get my fill of Beatles lore and spend a lot of time on the waterfront. It was beautiful weather all week, which, evidently, is not always the case.
Regarding the conference, I only attended a few talks because I wanted to chat with the vendors who had booths or were otherwise present. It’s nice to get beyond the formalities and the press releases and have good discussions. I found them all very open to answering my questions about their tech. By the way, such events are havens for industry gossip, which is fun.
My talk was “The Quantum Technologies Jigsaw Puzzle: Making Sure We Have All The Pieces.” It was a view across the market of quantum technologies, particularly computing. I thought the “jigsaw” theme was a good one, but I needed some decent visuals as I got closer to putting together the talk. I had a few slides like the following:
If you are curious, I use LaTeX and the jigsaw package from CTAN. It’s quite flexible, though I did have to search to find out how to set some options and stop it from generating a different configuration every time I rebuilt the image. I also used Python to generate LaTeX source, placing the text in the pieces. I don’t so much write talks as I code them.
NVIDIA is in a couple of links this time. I haven’t mentioned them much lately since I stopped doing the AI version of this newsletter (and no one seemed to notice that). The upgrade of IBM’s Tokyo system is a nice story about how support and maintenance become critical as your product offerings grow and mature.
Don’t forget to check out and bookmark our new sortable list of upcoming quantum technology conferences.
The latest Sutor Group report is freely available online: Quantum Processing Unit (QPU) Market Landscape (Abridged) – April 3, 2025. Updates and the full report are available for purchase or by subscription. Contact us for details.
Contents
Earnings Announcements and Financial Dealings
Nvidia in advanced talks to invest in PsiQuantum, The Information reports | Reuters
Date: Sunday, May 18, 2025
Excerpt: Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab is in advanced talks to invest in quantum computing startup PsiQuantum, The Information reported on Sunday. Nvidia and PsiQuantum declined to comment on the report.
Quantum Computing
The University of Tokyo to Equip IBM Quantum System One with Most Performant IBM Heron Processor
Date: Thursday, May 15, 2025
Commentary: I’m including this news because it answers the question, “What happens if I install a quantum computer and you come out with a better one next year? Am I stuck with an older model?” It’s non-trivial to support installed on-premise systems, especially if they have remote management.
Excerpt: This is the second update of the IBM Quantum System One as part of the collaboration between UTokyo and IBM. It was first deployed with a 27-qubit IBM Falcon QPU, before being updated to a 127-qubit IBM Eagle QPU in 2023. It is now transitioning to the latest generation highly performant IBM Heron later this year. IBM has deployed four Heron-based systems worldwide and their performance shows significant improvement over the previous Eagle QPU, with a 3-4x improvement in two-qubit error rates; an order of magnitude improvement in device-wide performance benchmarked by errors across 100-qubit long layers; continued improvement in speed, with a 60 percent increase in CLOPS expected; and a system uptime of more than 95%.
NVIDIA Grows Quantum Computing Ecosystem With Taiwan Manufacturers and Supercomputing | NVIDIA Blog
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/quantum-computing-ecosystem-taiwan-manufacturers-supercomputing/
Author: Timothy Costa
Date: Monday, May 19, 2025
Excerpt: Silicon developers, including Compal, Quanta and Taiwan’s National Center for High-Performance Computing accelerate quantum computing research with NVIDIA AI supercomputing hardware.
Quantum Computing | Technical
Optimizing Rydberg Gates for Logical-Qubit Performance | APS PRX Quantum
https://journals.aps.org/prxquantum/abstract/10.1103/PRXQuantum.4.020336
Authors: Sven Jandura; Jeff D. Thompson; and Guido Pupillo
Date: Monday, June 5, 2023
Excerpt: Robust gate sequences are widely used to reduce the sensitivity of gate operations to experimental imperfections. Typically, the optimization minimizes the average gate error; however, recent work in quantum error correction has demonstrated that the performance of encoded logical qubits is sensitive to not only the average error rate but also the type of errors that occur. Here, we present a family of Rydberg-blockade gates for neutral-atom qubits that are robust against two common major imperfections: intensity inhomogeneity and Doppler shifts. These gates outperform existing gates for moderate or large imperfections. We also consider the logical performance of these gates in the context of an erasure-biased qubit based on metastable 171Yb. In this case, we observe that the robust gates outperform existing gates for even very small values of the imperfections, because they maintain the native large bias toward erasure errors for these qubits. These results significantly reduce the laser stability and atomic temperature requirements to achieve fault-tolerant quantum computing with neutral atoms. The approach of optimizing gates for logical-qubit performance may be applied to other qubit platforms.
[2505.11218] Quantum computing with atomic qubit arrays: confronting the cost of connectivity
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.11218
Author: Saffman, M.
Date: Friday, May 16, 2025
Excerpt: These notes present a review of the status of quantum computing with arrays of neutral atom qubits, an approach which has demonstrated remarkable progress in the last few years. Scaling digital quantum computing to qubit counts and control fidelities that will enable solving outstanding scientific questions, and provide commercial value, is an outstanding challenge, not least because of the requirement of connecting and entangling distant qubits. Long-range Rydberg gates and physical motion outfit atomic qubit arrays with tools for establishing connectivity. These tools operate on different timescales and with distinct levels of parallelization. We analyze several prototypical architectures from the perspective of achieving fast connectivity for circuits with large scale entanglement, as well as fast cycle times for measurement based quantum error correcting codes. Extending Rydberg interactions to multiple atomic species has emerged as a promising route to achieving this latter requirement.
Sovereign Initiatives
Congress Urged to Double Quantum Funding to Compete With China – MeriTalk
https://www.meritalk.com/articles/congress-urged-to-double-quantum-funding-to-compete-with-china/
Date: Friday, May 16, 2025
Excerpt: Lawmakers and tech experts said today that Congress needs to sharply boost the Federal government’s proposed funding of for quantum technology in the fiscal year 2026 budget – to as much as twice recent levels – and argued that kind of increase is crucial for the United States to stay competitive with China in the race for quantum innovation and to set the tone for more private sector investment in the technology.
Sutor Group Intelligence and Advisory
Dr. Bob Sutor is the CEO and Founder of Sutor Group Intelligence and Advisory. Sutor Group provides broad market insights and deep technical expertise based on over four decades of experience with startups and large corporations. It advises Deep Tech startups, companies, and investors on quantum technologies, AI, and other emerging tech fields.
Sutor Group shares its knowledge and analysis through direct client engagements and seminars, reports, newsletters, books, written and on-air media appearances, and speaking and panel moderation at the top conferences and client events.
Legal Stuff
Visit the Copyright, Notices, Disclosures, Disclaimers, and Licenses on the Sutor Group website for applicable legal information for this content.
Previous Newsletter Edition
