Google Blog Discusses New Quantum AI Campus & Getting to THERE(!) Goal

(Google.Blog) Google’s new Quantum AI campus in Santa Barbara, California includes Google’s first quantum data center, quantum hardware research laboratories, and Google’s own quantum processor chip fabrication facilities. Erik Lucero, Lead Engineer for Google Quantum AI has written a blog about the new campus and about Google’s THERE(!) goal.
Lucero explains that Google is on a journey to build 1,000,000 physical qubits that work in concert inside a room-sized error-corrected quantum computer. That’s a big leap from today’s modestly-sized systems of fewer than 100 qubits.
To get there, Google’s blog says they must build the world’s first “quantum transistor” — two error-corrected “logical qubits” performing quantum operations together — and then figure out how to tile hundreds to thousands of them to form the error-corrected quantum computer. That will take years.
Google needs show it can encode one logical qubit — with 1,000 physical qubits. Using quantum error-correction, these physical qubits work together to form a long-lived nearly perfect qubit — a forever qubit that maintains coherence until power is removed, ushering in the digital era of quantum computing. Again, we expect years of concerted development to achieve this goal.
And to get THERE(!), Google needs to show that the more physical qubits participate in error correction, the more you can cut down on errors in the first place — this is a crucial step given how error-prone physical qubits are. We’re doing that research right now on our Quantum AI campus.
Already Google runs quantum computers that can perform calculations beyond the reach of classical computers. To continue this journey towards a useful error-corrected quantum computer and provide humanity with a new tool tuned to the way nature works, we’re assembling an amazing team to invent the future of computing together right here, right now, at Google’s Quantum AI campus