(TheNextWeb/TNW) IQT-News summarizes TNW’s announcement that Alphabet is reportedly planning to promote one of its Moonshot projects from venture to business in a bid to take advantage of its recent breakthroughs in the field of quantum computing and time crystals.
TNW’s Tristan Greene bases this analysis on a Business Insider (BI) report that Alphabet is planning to spinout Sandbox Technology Inc., a quantum company it’s been incubating as part of its Moonshot ventures program.
The BI report makes it seem like a done deal, which would mean Sandbox is set to exist alongside fellow sister companies in Google, Deep Mind, and more.
This is fairly rare in the big tech business world. Typically, with future techs, corporations such as Alphabet, IBM, Microsoft, and Meta snatch up startups left and right.
It isn’t every day we see one of the big players spin a quantum computing startup out. TNW explains that “. . the guess is that Sandbox is planning to announce new experiments and hopes to do some fundraising on its own”.
The Next Web cautions, “We have to see the launch announcements and the official business registries in order to opine on whether Sandbox will continue to research edge cases (such as time crystals) or if it plans on implementing a strategy and working towards the actual development of a quantum computing system it or Alphabet can market.
In other words, we don’t know whether Sandbox is spinning out to raise money for further research and hardware or to sell quantum technologies.
2021 was one of the most exciting years for quantum computing in memory. It’ll be hard to top the creation of time crystals, but it seems like a safe bet that Alphabet wouldn’t spin out a pet project unless there was money to be made.
What remains to be seen is how Sandbox and Google Quantum (which, as far as we know will still exist after the spin off) will work together.
The Next Web reports “We reached out to Alphabet for comment and will update this article if we hear anything back.”