QCI gets stock boost after announcing performance-boosting quantum software
Quantum Computing Inc. (QCI) saw its share price on Nasdaq jump by 33% Tuesday after the company announced a new software suite that it claims can expand the processing power of a gate model quantum computer by as much as five times and a quantum annealer by as much as 20 times.
The company’s stock, publicly listed as QUBT, closed at $3.88 late Tuesday, not much at all by some standards, but about 33% higher than where it closed the day before. The stock was priced well under $2 per share early last month, but has been tracking gradually upward since around May 23. (See the latest price for QUBT and other quantum stocks in IQT’s Quantum Stocks Zone.)
The rise in QCI’s stock value is the latest evidence of the immediate and often extreme reaction that the stock market has had to quantum news in recent months. For example, IonQ’s stock price plummeted after short-seller Scorpion Capital issued a controversial negative assessment of the firm.
The bump came shortly after QCI unveiled and filed for patents for QAmplify, a suite of “QPU expansion” software technologies the company said “is capable of supercharging any quantum computer to solve real-world realistic business problems today.” The software broadens the problem size limits that quantum computing systems are capable of addressing, regardless of whether they are gate model or quantum annealing systems, the company said.
The QAmplify gate model expansion’s demonstrated capabilities have been benchmarked at a 500% (5x) increase and the annealing expansion has been benchmarked at up to a 2,000% (20x) increase, the company claimed. For example, an IBM gate model quantum computer with QAmplify could solve a problem with over 600 variables, versus the current limit of 127 variables, according to QCI. In the cases of an annealing system, like D-Wave’s, QAmplify could solve an optimization with over 4,000 variables, versus the current limit of 200 for a dense matrix problem set.
“It is central to QCI’s mission to deliver practical and sustainable value to the quantum computing industry,” said William McGann, Chief Operating and Technology Officer of QCI. “QCI’s innovative software solutions deliver expansive compute capabilities for today’s state-of-the-art QPU systems and offer great future scalability as those technologies continually advance. The use of our QAmplify algorithm in the 2021 BMW Group Quantum Computing Challenge for vehicle sensor optimization provided proof of performance by expanding the effective capability of the annealer by 20-fold, to 2,888 qubits.”
Dan O’Shea has covered telecommunications and related topics including semiconductors, sensors, retail systems, digital payments and quantum computing/technology for over 25 years.
