Amazon Joins Quantum Race With New ‘Ocelot’ Chip

Quantum computing has received another boost, after Amazon Web Services claimed its new chip is a breakthrough in the quest to build fault-tolerant quantum computers.

AWS announced its new quantum computing chip Ocelot “can reduce the costs of implementing quantum error correction by up to 90 percent, compared to current approaches.”

Amazon engineers have been developing their own inhouse chips for a while now. Last July Amazon confirmed it was developing faster AI chips at its chip lab in Austin, Texas, that are cheaper than Nvidia’s offerings.

Ocelot chip

Now AWS’s Ocelot chip has been developed by the team at the AWS Center for Quantum Computing at the California Institute of Technology.

A video of AWS’s quantum computing lab is available here.

The cloud giant said that “Ocelot represents a breakthrough in the pursuit to build fault-tolerant quantum computers capable of solving problems of commercial and scientific importance that are beyond the reach of today’s conventional computers.”

Quantum computing is expected to revolutionise the way computers work by using building blocks whose functionality draws on quantum effects.

AWS apparently used a novel design for Ocelot’s architecture, building error correction in from the ground up and using the ‘cat qubit’.

Cat qubits – named after the famous Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment – intrinsically suppress certain forms of errors, reducing the resources required for quantum error correction, said AWS. Through this new approach with Ocelot, AWS researchers have, for the first time, combined cat qubit technology and additional quantum error correction components onto a microchip that can be manufactured in a scalable fashion using processes borrowed from the microelectronics industry.

Want to know more about practical quantum computers and what this could mean for your business? Click here to read Silicon UK’s ‘Qubits Are Coming‘

“With the recent advancements in quantum research, it is no longer a matter of if, but when practical, fault-tolerant quantum computers will be available for real-world applications. Ocelot is an important step on that journey,” said Oskar Painter, AWS director of Quantum Hardware.

“In the future, quantum chips built according to the Ocelot architecture could cost as little as one-fifth of current approaches, due to the drastically reduced number of resources required for error correction,” said Painter. “Concretely, we believe this will accelerate our timeline to a practical quantum computer by up to five years.”

AWS researchers have published their findings in a peer-reviewed research paper in Nature. There is also a more technical article about Ocelot on the Amazon Science website.

Quantum computing challenges

Amazon noted that one of the major challenges with quantum computing is that they’re incredibly sensitive to the smallest changes, or ‘noise’ in their environment.

This could be from vibrations, heat, electromagnetic interference from cell phones and Wi-Fi networks, or even cosmic rays and radiation from outer space, which can all knock qubits out of their quantum state, causing errors in the quantum computation being performed.

AWS said this has historically made it extremely challenging to build quantum computers that can perform reliable, error-free calculations of any significant complexity.

“The biggest challenge isn’t just building more qubits,” said Painter. “It’s making them work reliably.”

To solve this problem, quantum computers rely on quantum error correction that uses special encodings of quantum information across multiple qubits – in the form of ‘logical’ qubits – to shield quantum information from the environment. This also enables the detection and correction of errors as they occur. Unfortunately, given the sheer number of qubits required to get accurate results, current approaches to quantum error correction have come at a huge, and therefore prohibitive, cost, said AWS.

To address the current problems associated with quantum error correction, researchers at AWS developed Ocelot. Ocelot was designed from the ground up with error correction “built in.”

“We looked at how others were approaching quantum error correction and decided to take a different path,” said Painter. “We didn’t take an existing architecture and then try to incorporate error correction afterwards. We selected our qubit and architecture with quantum error correction as the top requirement. We believe that if we’re going to make practical quantum computers, quantum error correction needs to come first.”

In fact, according to Painter, his team estimates that scaling Ocelot to a “fully-fledged quantum computer capable of transformative societal impact would requireas little as one-tenth of the resources associated with standard quantum error correcting approaches.”

AWS pointed out that while today’s announcement is a promising start, Ocelot is still a prototype and AWS is committed to continuing to invest in quantum research and refining its approach.

The arrival of Ocelot from AWS comes after Microsoft last week introduced Majorana 1, which it said is “the world’s first quantum chip powered by a new Topological Core architecture”, which is a breakthrough type of material which can observe and control Majorana particles to produce more reliable and scalable qubits, which are the building blocks for quantum computers.