Last week Google announced the launch of the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab together with NASA’s Ames Research Center and the Universities Space Research Association (USRA). This laboratory will host a quantum computer created by D-Wave Systems, the D-Wave Two model that will be used for various scientific research, particularly on machine learning. The ultimate goal is to build new models for problems such as climate change.

D-Wave Systems, Inc. is a company founded in 1999 and based in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, which in recent years has been the center of various controversies when it started presenting prototypes of quantum computers. This type of computer is still highly experimental so there were doubts that the processors created by D-Wave were really of the quantum type.

In 2011, D-Wave Systems announced the D-Wave One, a quantum computer with a 128-qubit processor that uses the method called quantum annealing. Shortly after the announcement, Lockheed Martin signed a contract with D-Wave to have one of those quantum computers to use for their own research and development.

At the beginning of 2012, D-Wave Systems announced a new 512-qubit quantum processor to be used in the D-Wave Two computer. Recently, this system has been tested and showed performance 3,600 times higher than those of a high-end PC. The price, however, is very high: official figures haven’t been provided but according to rumors the price is $15 million.

A few months ago, Lockheed Martin replaced its D-Wave One with a D-Wave Two, according to rumors for $10 million, and now Google has bought one. Therefore we can assume that the system actually works as advertised by the manufacturer. Of course, Google has money to invest so it can very well afford the cost of a D-Wave Two but even a company always on the frontier of innovation doesn’t throw away its money on a product that doesn’t provide at least promising performances.

Quantum computers are the future but obviously someone in Google, NASA and Lockheed Martin think that they can be already used today to solve practical problems. It will be really interesting to see what results may be obtained.

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