Does HP Have Interest in IonQ Beyond Partnership?
HPC In 2020: Acquisitions And Mergers As The New Normal
Key points…
+ After a decade of vendor consolidation that saw some of the world’s biggest IT firms acquire first-class HPC providers such as SGI, Cray, and Sun Microsystems, as well as smaller players like Penguin Computing, WhamCloud, Appro, and Isilon, it is natural to wonder who is next. Or maybe, more to the point, who is left?
As far as we can tell, HPE has no plans to acquire the company (and it shares investment in the startup with other companies, including Amazon, Google, and Samsung, among others). But if HPE is truly convinced IonQ is the path forward, it would make sense to pull the acquisition trigger sooner rather than later.
+ That said, HPE has recently invested in IonQ, a promising quantum computing startup that has built workable prototype using ion trap technology. The investment was provided via Pathfinder, HPE’s investment arm. In an internal blog post on the subject penned by Abhishek Shukla, managing director of global venture investments, and Ray Beausoleil, Senior Fellow of large scale integrated photonics, the authors extol the virtues of IonQ’s technical approach:
+ “IonQ’s technology has already surpassed all other quantum computers now available, demonstrating the largest number of usable qubits in the market. Its gate fidelity, which measures the accuracy of logical operations, is greater than 98 percent for both one-qubit and two-qubit operations, meaning it can handle longer calculations than other commercial quantum computers. We believe IonQ’s qubits and methodology are of such high quality, they will be able to scale to 100 qubits (and 10,000 gate operations) without needing any error correction.”
Source: THENEXTPLATFORM. Michael Feldman, HPC In 2020: Acquisitions And Mergers As The New Normal…
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