It is a frequent assumption that Quantum Computing is a long -term bet that can take at least a decade to make a profit. But that's not always the case.
At the TNW conference in Amsterdam last week, Jan Goetz, co-founder and co-CEO of the Finnish quantum start-start-IQM, unveiled his company much earlier with a page from SpaceX's financing game book.
“When we started it was a classic deep tech case, and people thought that the income would be five to ten years,” said Goetz. “No, that's stupid. With these very early stages you can already make money.”
Instead of waiting for a fully developed product, IQM has focused on selling quantum computers in its resulting stadiums to state -funded research institutions. The approach is similar to that, as SpaceX sold early rockets to the public sector customers, even if many of these rockets failed shortly after the start. The idea, said Goetz, was to build early partnerships that would finance future development.
IQM was founded in 2018 and signed his first contract in 2020 and sold his first system shortly afterwards. The company has previously sold 13 quantum computers worldwide and has a booking pipeline of more than € 90 million, which means that it is one of the sector in the industry. It is also the second best quantum hardware company in Europe, which has collected a total of EUR 200 million (EUR 181 million).
The 💜 the EU technology
The latest rumors from the EU -Tech scene, a story of our wise old founder Boris and some questionable KI art. It is free of charge every week in your inbox. Register now!
Goetz said the biggest challenge for Quantum Computing was not technological, but financially. Although he does not believe that Europe has lost the Tech race, he warned that the continent could not compete with countries like the USA or China without serious capital.
“Europe has excellent universities and research projects, but can we scale them in competitive companies and industries?” he asked. “We see that the industry begins to get involved, but the level of investment is still quite small.”
Jan Goetz was a co -founder of IQM alongside Mikko Mötönen, Kuan Yen Tan and Juha Vartiainen in 2018. Credit: IQM
Goetz believes that the next major shift in the quantum computer landscape will not come from end users, but from the infrastructure layer – especially from companies that create and operate data centers.
He expects you to quickly expand these investments. “I think that will happen next on the private side, and hopefully we can really activate the commercial uses so that all end users can help build the industry.”
Goetz also dealt with the potential effects of artificial intelligence. He noticed that it will remain technically difficult to drive a lot of data through quantum computers for the foreseeable future, which will restrict their capacity for AI applications. However, there is an emerging role for Quantum in AI, especially when creating training data. IQM develops this ability by working with Siemens on quantum -reinforced machine learning.
“What quantum computers can do is really a real randomness,” said Goetz. “[They] Can actually be used to generate synthetic data for training AI models more efficiently … it is like democratic vote. They combine a group of qubits, and if some go wrong, the rest can correct them. The majority give you the right answer and the errors will be turned back. “
Comments are closed.