Silicon Valley giants are doubling down! After Microsoft, Amazon also officially announces quantum computing chips, with new breakthroughs that can reduce error correction costs by up to 90%

At the end of last year, Google's quantum chip Willow ignited a wave of interest in quantum computing, and this month, Silicon Valley giants are further increasing their investments in this trend. Following Microsoft, Amazon also officially announced its first self-developed quantum computing chip a week later.

On Thursday, February 27, Eastern Time, Amazon's cloud services division, Amazon Web Services (AWS), announced that its developed quantum computing chip is named Ocelot, which can reduce the cost of quantum error correction by up to 90% compared to current methods.

Ocelot was jointly developed by the AWS quantum computing center team and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). AWS believes it represents a breakthrough in building fault-tolerant quantum computers that can solve important problems in business and science that current traditional computers cannot address.

Earlier this week, the AWS quantum computing center team demonstrated their new breakthrough in fault-tolerant quantum computing in a paper published in the journal Nature. The team used an innovative design called "cat qubits" to develop a quantum error correction system that requires lower hardware demands. The new design can resist specific types of noise and errors that may interfere with the output of quantum systems while achieving a lower total number of components required for qubits compared to other designs.

Cat qubits originate from Schrödinger's cat thought experiment, referring to a quantum system that can simultaneously exist in a superposition of two macroscopically distinct states. If cat qubits are used for error correction, they will have a higher inherent resistance to a type of error known as bit flip at the hardware level, at the cost of being more susceptible to another type of error called phase flip. This error deviation allows the AWS team to design quantum error correction codes that focus solely on handling phase flip errors, resulting in a design that requires fewer additional qubits and is overall more efficient.

On Thursday, AWS stated that its team believes cat qubits can inherently suppress certain forms of errors, thereby reducing the resources needed for quantum error correction. The architecture of Ocelot employs a novel design that uses cat qubits for quantum error correction. For the first time, AWS researchers have combined cat qubit technology with other quantum error correction components onto a single microchip, which can be produced in a scalable manner using processes borrowed from the microelectronics industry.

Ocelot is currently just a prototype. Oskar Painter, head of quantum hardware at AWS, believes that this new type of chip represents an important step for humanity towards manufacturing fault-tolerant quantum computers, helping to accelerate the realization of practical quantum computers. Since the Ocelot architecture developed by AWS can significantly reduce the resources required for error correction, if quantum computing chips can utilize this architecture, costs could potentially decrease by 80% compared to existing methods.

Painter said:

"With the latest advancements in quantum research, fault-tolerant quantum computers will no longer be a question of whether they exist, but rather when they can be put into practical use. Ocelot is an important step on this journey.

In the future, quantum chips built on the Ocelot architecture could cost only one-fifth of current methods, as the amount of resources required for error correction is greatly reduced. Specifically, we believe this will allow us to advance the timeline for achieving practically usable quantum computers by up to five years."