In recent weeks, IQT News has been asking several companies from across the quantum sector to weigh in on the state of the industry, key challenges that remain and visions and hopes of the future.
The final entry in this series (It’s mid-January after all…) comes from Pasqal, a company that already made some big news in the opening days of the new year with its merger with Qu&Co. The company last month partnered with Thales in pursuit of aerospace and defense opportunities, and with Nvidia to build a quantum center of excellence. Pasqal has been looking to go head-to-head with the likes of IBM by pursuing a goal to achieve 1,000 qubits by next year.
IQT News recently exchanged emails with Pasqal CEO Georges-Olivier Reymond, who had this to say about the year ahead in quantum computing:
2022 will be a pivotal year for the quantum industry. Use cases will continue to multiply and the major players in quantum will move closer to quantum advantage. The best technologies will progress rapidly both in terms of their number of qubits and their fidelity.
The quantum industry will soon see the emergence of the first industrial application that will be equivalent to, or even surpass the performance of classical computers on many metrics. Furthermore, we cannot exclude the possibility that as early as this year quantum computers will be cheaper, consume less energy and have a greater strategic impact than classical computers for certain industrial applications. Therefore, we expect to see clear and identifiable competitive advantages of quantum computers come to light in 2022.
Services related to quantum computing, such as the cloud, will grow significantly, and the years to come will allow us to precisely quantify the gains which quantum computing can provide for various stakeholders. We also foresee the industry will soon enter an intense production phase. The quantum computing market is still in its early stages, equivalent to the market for classical computers back in the 1950s, and we expect 2022 to bring an acceleration of scaling up across the quantum industry.