Interview: Rob Hays, CEO of Atom Computing

Atom Computing are one of the leading sponsors at Quantum.Tech Boston 2022. Ahead of the fantastic event in June 2022, we caught up with Rob Hays, CEO of Atom Computing, to discuss their predictions for quantum technology in 2022, what Atom Computing do and what they are looking forward to the most at Quantum.Tech Boston 2022.

For those who are not aware of Atom Computing; are you able to give us a bit of an insight into your business?

Atom Computing is a quantum computing hardware company founded in 2018 by Ben Bloom, PhD & Jonathan King, PhD in Berkeley, CA. The company was the fastest to deliver a system of 100 Qubits and with world record coherence time.

Our QC hardware is based on nuclear-spin qubits made from optically-trapped neutral atoms. As a quantum computing architecture, it’s pretty new and showing great promise with regard to being able to create large-scale quantum computing systems on the order of thousands and eventually millions of qubits. Neutral atom systems work by trapping an array of atoms in spots of light and manipulating their quantum states, wirelessly, with precisely controlled lasers.

To scale up the system with more qubits, we simply create more spots of light to trap more atoms. Each qubit is individually addressable, and we can run multiple gates in parallel. On top of that, we have a software stack and APIs for users to program the system and run applications remotely.

Congratulations on your recent very successful Series B Funding Round; what does the future hold now?

After proving our neutral-atom technology and architectural building blocks with our first prototype system, “Phoenix”, we are now building our second generation of systems and planning to commercialise them via cloud service partners next year. In addition to working towards our commercial launch and partnering with our first customers and the ecosystem, we are continuing to recruit top technical talent in multiple disciplines to continue advancing the technology and deliver our roadmap.

What are your big Quantum technology predictions for 2022?

At the beginning of the year, I made six predictions for 2022 in a blog. We’re almost halfway through the year now and I’m curious to see how many of my predictions play out as I thought they would. They are:

• Newer quantum computing modalities will achieve eye-opening breakthroughs. By the end of 2022, I predicted that neutral atoms will be on equal footing in terms of awareness compared to the earlier technologies – superconductors and trapped ions - and we may also see demonstrations of other new modalities like photonics, quantum dots, electron on helium, or silicon spin qubits.
• Increased attention in NISQ use-cases at various scales. I think we will see novel ways of using NISQ machines for a modest set of interesting use-cases in financial services, aerospace, logistics, and perhaps pharma or chemistry. This year, applications developers will figure out how to gain more commercial value out of NISQ systems with thousands of qubits, but the hardware won’t quite get there in 2022.
• Cloud Service Providers will double down on quantum computing. CSPs can profit from quantum computing faster and at a much larger magnitude than nearly all other sectors, at least initially. I expect to see them double down to ensure they have viable technology options that can meet their hyper-scale & hybrid compute needs and capture a significant share of the value chain in the future. Some will invest in multiple, competing technologies in order to diversify their risk.
• Investments in Quantum will continue to break records. 2021 saw $1.7B of venture capital investment in Quantum Computing start-ups, IonQ IPO, the Quantinuum merger, and billions committed from governments. I predicted quantum investments to break new records in 2022+ with more companies entering the race and up to five companies would IPO. I doubt we will reach five as the current market window for IPOs is closing.
• Diversity and inclusion will be a bigger focus in Quantum. While there is strong competition for scarce talent among the industry players, I think we will see more cooperation in attracting talent and career development for women and minorities in quantum. As the technology matures toward commercialization, we will see a much broader set of job roles available, expanding the available talent pool beyond university physics labs.
• Regional Quantum Centers of Excellence will enable collaboration. Regional interests are organizing among universities, government labs, and private companies. These collaborative partnerships provide environments of innovation to accelerate technology and market development in their regions in an effort to gain a competitive advantage in quantum computing. As an example, Atom Computing recently joined the CUbit Quantum Initiative in Colorado and the Chicago Quantum Exchange where we are already realising collaboration benefits.

Do you see quantum computing replacing or augmenting classical computing in years to come?

No, quantum computing will not replace classical computing. Rather, it will be integrated with classical computing into the hybrid compute infrastructure, which has become the norm in HPC and cloud data centers over the last decade. Applications will run on classical servers and offload portions of the computation to quantum systems and then return the answers back to the application. Quantum Processing Units, or QPUs, will be another form of workload accelerator that fit into clusters of CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and AI accelerators. There is a lot of innovation happening in hybrid compute today. Workload performance over the Total Cost of Ownership of the infrastructure is what matters to users and cloud data center operators. You typically want at least a 3X speed up in a workload in order to justify the cost to deploy and program a new accelerator technology. Not 2X because if it were only 2X, you’d be better off avoiding the cost of new and waiting for Moore’s Law to catch up on the old technology.… With quantum computers we will get orders of magnitude speed up - that’s what’s so exciting and compelling about the technology.

You are kindly one of our lead sponsors at Quantum.Tech in Boston this June; what are you looking forward to at the conference?

Quantum Tech Boston is bringing together a strong program of industry experts, thought leaders, and most importantly end-users of quantum computing. Participating in this ecosystem event is important for Atom Computing because we are on a mission to build the world’s largest and most reliable quantum computers. As we get closer to launching our product, we are looking for great partners and end-users who want to learn and scale their applications with us to accelerate business value through quantum computing.

To join Rob Hays and Atom Computing at Quantum.Tech Boston 2022, register your space here!