Amazon Web Services Launches Ocelot Quantum Chip

February has been an exciting time for quantum computing. Last week, the tech world was abuzz with the announcement of Microsoft’s Majorana 1 quantum computer, which featured a breakthrough in error tolerance thanks to topological qubits. Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) continued to surprise by announcing its own quantum computer chip called Ocelot. This chip uses a new technology called cat qubits, which also offers breakthrough benefits in error tolerance, maintaining stable performance for the system.

Cat qubits (named after Schrödinger's cat experiment) are a method for creating stable logical qubits from just 9 physical qubits instead of the thousands required in current systems. As a result, the number of physical qubits required to achieve practical quantum computing can be reduced from around 1 million to 100,000 qubits, reducing hardware requirements while maintaining system efficiency and stability.

The most notable feature of AWS’s Ocelot quantum chip is its ability to reduce the cost of deploying error correction by up to 90%. AWS published its findings in a paper in the journal Nature, a major step toward making quantum computing accessible to industrial applications.

Speaking about the launch of Ocelot, AWS Quantum Hardware Director Oskar Painter, said:

With recent advances in quantum research, it is no longer a question of whether practical, fault-tolerant quantum computers will be available for real-world applications, but when. Ocelot is an important step on that journey. In the future, quantum chips built on the Ocelot architecture could cost as little as one-fifth of current approaches, thanks to a significant reduction in the amount of resources required for error correction. Specifically, we believe this will accelerate the path to a practical quantum computer by up to five years.

According to AWS, Ocelot consists of 14 main components. These include 5 data qubits (cat qubits), 5 buffer circuits to stabilize the data qubits, and 4 other qubits to detect errors in the data qubits. Amazon has also published a technical paper on Ocelot for those who want to dig deeper into the technical details.

Quantum computing is a complex topic, but we will hear more about breakthroughs in the field over the next decade, so it is useful to have a basic understanding of the basics to help pave the way for the next steps in quantum technology.