IonQ CEO Peter Chapman Interviewed about New Partnership with QuantumBasel

Late last month, IonQ announced a partnership with the Swiss-based QuantumBasel to co-found a European quantum data center, with QuantumBasel offering the uptownBasel ecosystem, including companies, research institutes, startups and universities, direct access to ionQ system.

During the signing of the partnership, CEO of IonQ Peter Chapman interviewed by QuantumBasel about the scope of the collaboration.

“Well, what we found with QuantumBasel is that they have the same vision as us, especially in the application space,” said Chapman, when asked about the collaboration and synergy that would be created. “So we look forward to working with the team here on producing the next generation of applications in quantum.”

Little Gold Box

Chapman was then asked about the little gold box he brought with him to the signing of the partnership and about the IonQ technology.

“What we brought today is a small quantum processor. This is the next generation QPU for one of our systems,” said Chapman. “And what we hope for is an algorithmic qubit of 64, which should be able to rival the world’s largest supercomputers for certain applications.”

The QuantumBasel interviewer then asked Chapman about IonQ’s technology and what IonQ could bring to the partnership and the larger quantum ecosystem in Switzerland.

“Our system is an optical quantum computer. We don’t use optical qubits, but the rest of the system is completely optical. And clearly, this part of the world is a leader in high-precision optical systems,” said Chapman. “Today, we use components from all over the world: about eighty percent of our systems are actually made outside the US and most come from this part of the world. So, as we wanted to move into manufacturing quantum computing, out of the R&D system and now into a production point of view, this was very important to us.

For QuantumBasel, the final question Chapman asked was what challenges in the industry could IonQ face.

“I think quantum machine learning will definitely be one of the first suites of applications that will come out of the #AQ 35 system. At #AQ 64, people can start to see a lot of applications where you can get quantum advantage or quantum supremacy. So one would expect things like pharmaceuticals, which are also big in this area, in this part of the world — maybe not in the chemistry sense — but in the machine learning sense to be able to come up with better drug candidates. This is going to be an interesting thing for #AQ 64,” said Chapman.

Featured image: QuantumBasel