That quantum computing It will be one of the ingredients and technologies that will serve to solve some of the most important computing problems of the future. It is not, at this point it is something that is not lost on anyone who has some knowledge of the IT landscape or research in various fields. ButIt will remain experimental and will be mostly noise.either there will be someone capable of achieving economic benefits of quantum computing?
The doubts in this regard are many, and not at all unreasonable. In principle. This is a technology that is not going to be sold on a large scale. It’s not exactly economical either. On the bright side, its cost, although high, will be only part of what the advantages achieved thanks to quantum computing will be worth. The same thing is already happening with high-performance computing, which provides many benefits, especially in research processes. Of course, it is not particularly profitable. Neither in its beginnings nor now, several years after its explosion.
Of course, the changes derived from the explosion of AI, with inference and training of large-scale models, can change your situation and improve your profitability. The computing needs of Artificial Intelligence may be the decisive ingredient for this. Will quantum computing have a similar breakthrough in the future?
To see how far quantum computing can go, it is necessary to start by determining what market it has. According to a report published by IDC just a few weeks ago, Sales related to quantum computing reach $1.1 billion in 2022and will grow at an annual rate of 48.1% until reaching 7.6 billion of dollars by 2027.
It does not seem like an exaggerated amount of money when compared to other sectors. Especially if you take into account the income generated by the sales of the machines responsible for training large AI language models. And it is precisely AI, and its change of direction towards generative Artificial Intelligence, that has slowed investment in quantum computing. At least IDC has reduced it slightly.
In its previous forecast for this market, made in November 2021, it projected that the quantum computing market would grow from $412 million in 2021 to $8.6 billion in 2023, with an annual growth rate of 50.9 %. It is not much greater growth either, but it is a notable reduction for one of the technologies considered the future of large-scale computing.
Without a doubt, predicting what will happen in a six-year window in terms of investment in a given technology is complicated, and it is normal that sales revenue forecasts sometimes improve or worsen. What has happened in this case, basically, is that the level of investment in quantum computing technologies in recent years has been 20 times higher in 2020 to remain at 10 times higher in 2021, and drop to a level that doubles it slightly in 2027. It is a good evolution curve, but it shows that the revenue generated expected from quantum computing will not cover the investment costs.
This happens especially when a technology is taking its first steps. Also if it is a complicated technology that does not have excessive applications at a general level. Which reminds us of what has happened to the high-end of high-performance computing in recent decades, which in many cases has been used in managing nuclear weapons and ensuring that they still work. Except in this case, high-performance computing may not be profitable at all, despite all the good it brings to the world at large.
Oliver Tonneay, partner at the venture capital investor Quanto Nation, which is dedicated to investing in quantum computing projects, gave a presentation at last year’s HPC User Forum, showing the various types of quantum computing technologies, and how much was invested in each in 2021 and 2022 In total, the investment in 2022 was $1.35 billion in the sector. Notably, more was invested in the United States and Canada than in Europe
The expert also showed the level of public investment in quantum computing in various regions and countries around the world, and curiously, public entities invest much more in quantum computing in China and the European Union. China is taking quantum computing very seriously, judging by how much it invests in it. That does not mean that investments are always accurate or efficient. But money is usually one of the best ways to advance a technology.
Hyperion Research, a company spun out of IDC and that it bought a Chinese company, provides even less optimistic income figures. According to Nextplatform, they would remain at 728 million dollars in 2023 and 888 million dollars in 2024. Regarding the number of companies dedicated to quantum computing, there are the most in the United States, followed by the United Kingdom, China, Canada, Germany , France, Netherlands, Australia and Spain. In tenth position is Japan, followed by Ireland, Finland and Austria.
By type, quantum computing companies mainly use superconduction, photonics, captive ions, spinning, neutral atoms, silicon, topological system, quantum annealing, and photonic spin qubits. According to data from last autumn, furthermore, there were only 44 quantum computing hardware vendors and a dozen different qubit generation methods.
It remains to be seen what happens with all this, if quantum computing is a market that remains stagnant, or if a combination of factors occurs that makes it grow more than expected in the future. For now, its improvement is slow and it is not at all clear that it will become a profitable technology, although it is beneficial in numerous fields.
