Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.D-Wave said it had crossed a critical threshold that would lead to the first practical uses of quantum computing, potentially bringing a pay-off for the controversial technical path it has followed for 25 years at a cost of more than half a billion dollars.The Canadian company said a research paper published in the journal Science on Wednesday showed it had achieved “quantum supremacy”, a term that describes the moment when a quantum machine is able to solve a problem that is too complex for even the most powerful “classical”, or traditional, computer to handle.Chief executive Alan Baratz said D-Wave had reached “the Holy Grail of quantum computing”. “This is what everybody in the industry has been aspiring to, and we’re the first to actually demonstrate it,” he added.However, rather than trying to build a universal computer capable of handling almost any type of problem — the goal of most companies in the field — D-Wave chose a more limited form of the technology, known as quantum annealing. This is best suited to solving complex optimisation problems, as well as some forms of materials simulation.Despite the technology’s narrower scope, its suitability for calculations like the so-called travelling salesman problem, finding the optimal route between a large number of different locations, is still seen as giving it potentially wide applicability in business. “That type of problem is very, very broad,” said Heather West, an analyst at IDC. “It’s prevalent among all industries and almost all companies.”D-Wave’s claim follows a spate of recent quantum advances by bigger tech companies, including Google, Microsoft and Amazon. Those groups are working on general purpose systems with a wider range of uses but are still some years from developing practical machines.In the paper in Science, D-Wave said its latest generation of quantum machines had taken about 20 minutes to simulate a material with a complex magnetic field at a level of detail that would have taken the most powerful supercomputer nearly 1mn years to match. It also said its demonstration was the first time a quantum computer had been applied to a type of problem that could have practical uses. Being able to simulate new magnetic materials, which have a wide range of industrial uses, meant their properties could be understood before they are put into production, said Baratz.D-Wave chose to focus on annealing as the quickest way to create a business around quantum technology after it failed with its first plan of finding a bigger tech company to sell out to, said Haig Farris, a venture capitalist who handed D-Wave’s founders their first C$4,000 investment in 1999.The technology choice has long led to it being overlooked by the rest of the quantum computing “establishment”, added Farris. “It’s as though we don’t exist, and yet we’re the only company that actually has a business,” he said.Despite narrowing its ambition, the company went on to rack up accumulated losses of more than $540mn, leaving it facing a financial squeeze that led its management to begin warning in 2022 that it might not be able to continue as a going concern. The company won a financial reprieve after quantum computing stocks rallied sharply late last year, enabling it to tap Wall Street for another $375mn.“I had no idea — none of us did — how long it would take and how much money it would take,” said Farris, who also served as the company’s first chair.Google is the only other company to have claimed quantum supremacy for one of its machines, a point it said it reached in 2019. But its assertion was quickly challenged, with rivals showing that a traditional supercomputer could have been programmed to handle the same task in much less time than Google had claimed.Rather than “supremacy”, the research paper in Science described D-Wave’s breakthrough only as “quantum advantage”, a lesser achievement that most in the industry use to describe systems that have demonstrated only a marginal — if still important — advantage over a classical system. The journal’s editors rejected the use of the term supremacy in part because of its connotations with white supremacists, said Marcel Franz, a physics professor at the University of British Columbia and one of the paper’s authors.D-Wave has claimed that its machines have been commercially useful for years, although it has struggled to build a sizeable business. It sold its first three quantum computers 14 years ago, including one to a consortium that included Google and Nasa, before turning instead to selling access to its technology through the cloud. It generated revenue of only $6.5mn and a loss of $57mn in the nine months to September last year.The quarter century D-Wave has already taken so far to build a business is not excessive when compared with the decades it took to commercialise traditional computers after the invention of the transistor, said Franz. “It’s not surprising that we’re not carrying quantum computers in our pockets. But there are now quantum computers that do things that are almost useful,” he said.
