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IBM Spins Off the First Pure-Play Quantum Chip Foundry
- stogot 6mo agoThe article talks about IBM spreading bets to other techniques. Reminds me to ponder again. Has Microsoft retracted their sketchy quantum claims about inventing new states of matter in the past year? https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2025/03/12/microsofts-quantum-breakthrough-claim-labeled-unreliable/664284 https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2025/03/12/microsofts-qu...
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- madanparas 6mo agoThe real story isn't the $2B. It's that the foundry is standalone, so other quantum hardware companies can use it. Shared infrastructure beats nine separate research cleanrooms.
- Zigurd 6mo agoIs there enough agreement regarding what is a quantum chip, and what process technology is necessary to make one?
- imglorp 6mo agoIs there any agreement regarding real applications that warrant fab volume or is this still speculation?
- bawolff 6mo agoThere is high agreement on what the real applications of Quantum computing are. Unfortunately these projects are basically useless when it comes to them.
- icegreentea2 6mo agoCan you clarify? Do you mean that superconducting qubits are unable to perform the "real applications" theoretically, or that superconducting qubits at the scale this foundry could produce will be unable, or that superconducting qubits that will foundry could produce will still be outperformed by classical techniques?
- bawolff 6mo agoI mean, we are no where near the scale [qubit count] & quality where the applications apply. Not just this foundry but in general. I suppose the point is to eventually get there, but we are not close yet. You should still view anything Quantum as early R&D.
- ghaff 6mo agoI don't have the same level of cynicism with quantum that I had with enterprise blockchain. (Hey, I spent a number of years getting sucked into things that didn't pan out along with some that did in a big way.) I pretty much agree with respect to quantum. Practical value is probably further away than a number of folks were betting on at one point though I still believe it's there.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- rbanffy 6mo ago> You should still view anything Quantum as early R&D. The good thing is that someone who can make lots of chips can reduce the effort it takes to do R&D. With more people researching possible applications, it's likely we'll progress more quickly.
- NooneAtAll3 6mo ago> There is high agreement on what the real applications of Quantum computing are. and what are those applications?
- ghaff 6mo agoI've been out of the space for a bit. IBM has been betting on the engineered superconducting approach, which makes sense given their background, but there are other options, often for potentially different problem areas. Need to dive back in.
- ktallett 6mo agoThe superconducting approach is great in principle but has so many issues that need to be solved, from cooling, to energy to cool, to max number of qubits before you can't cool to operating temperature, before optimal connectivity to rest of system and so on. I am of the view photonics is the way forward but as you say, it will depend on the task at hand partially.
- ghaff 6mo agoI won't argue with that. There's photonics, there's trapped ion. Need to dive back in.
- rbanffy 6mo agoI guess it's a balance. If you think their process makes workable chips for your designs, then you can use it. If you can't adapt your design to what they can build, then you need to build your own foundry. Chances are a reliable supplier will push the market in the direction of their process. If we had someone making GaAs processors in the 1980s for a price competitive with their silicon counterparts and with a long-term roadmap, we'd have very different computers now. And some extra toxic waste problems.
- gaze 6mo agoFor superconducting qubits, yes. For other architectures everyone is doing their own thing.
- dvh 6mo agoCan the chips they plan to make there run Shor?
- bawolff 6mo agoIf they could in any meaningful way, i'm pretty sure the press release would have lead with that.
- upofadown 6mo agoFrom the article: >IBM is developing four custom ASICs — a decoder, a two-qubit gate controller, a single-qubit controller, and an amplifier — designed to handle quantum control at scale, with these circuits expected to converge around 2029 at the point where power consumption becomes manageable at up to 3 megawatts per system. The current hotness seems to be based on creating pairs of entangled qubits based on what might be realistically achieved with error correction. Shor's requires thousands of entangled qubits (something like 4000 for 2K RSA and 1500 for 256 bit elliptic curves). So unless someone comes up with a way to break cryptography using pairs of entangled qubits then this probably isn't relevant.
- caminante 6mo agoThis is a pro-IBM piece. I'm surprised it has zero mention of potential advantages of trapped ion despite being superior on stability windows, accuracy, and operating temps. I also appreciate the disclosure about AI generated content, but this article gets too repetitive.
- DeathArrow 6mo agoTwo questions: -do the chips help with inference? -can you run Doom on the chips?
- rbanffy 6mo agoBeing for quantum computing, the answer is both yes and no. You need to collapse the wave function to pick one.
- ArchieScrivener 6mo agoA bailout for a company that stopped innovating and instead has been inventing new ways to create middle management and bureaucracy. So much for capitalism.
- postalcoder 6mo agoSeems like tacit acknowledgment that IBM mothership is not the right place for a speculative growth play from both a management and capital perspective. I’m not IBMologist but I do remember how IBM pushed Watson when it was clear that upper management had no idea what Watson actually was. Regardless of the viability of the underlying technology, it’s best to keep such things away from the consultants. Also, article is very difficult to read. Bad typeface, spacing, coherence and prose. I found the press release less strained. https://newsroom.ibm.com/ibm-and-u-s-department-of-commerce-announce-americas-first-purpose-built-quantum-foundry https://newsroom.ibm.com/ibm-and-u-s-department-of-commerce-...
- horns4lyfe 6mo agoWell ya, it’s an Indian IT sweatshop at this point.
- senthil_rajasek 6mo agoI now work in an I.T dept of a financial company in U.S and I've also worked at software companies in India. They are all sweatshops these days.
- winfredJa 6mo agofinancial companies have always been sweatshops but it wasnt the case for IBM before dot com.
- Traubenfuchs 6mo agoI remember when watson was touted as soon to be replacement for doctors more than 10 years ago… https://www.henricodolfing.ch/en/case-study-20-the-4-billion-ai-failure-of-ibm-watson-for-oncology/ https://www.henricodolfing.ch/en/case-study-20-the-4-billion...
- MichaelZuo 6mo agoI don’t understand why IBM never tried to make amends and reclaim their former credibility somehow. Do IBM decison makers intentionally want to have that hang over the whole firm and be the butt of jokes?
- qzgrid37 6mo ago[dead]
- mathattack 6mo agoInteresting. My observation on IBM is their entire business model is: 1 - Audit your customers 2 - Buy back shares 3 - Force early retirements It was easy to see why Watson failed in that environment. The revenue was “We’ll let you out of the $6mm audit bill if you buy $2mm of Watson”. Companies would agree, install better asset management, and never put Watson into production. I couldn’t imagine Quantum Comouting surviving there. Spinning it off the best play.
- rr808 6mo agoTheir business model is more like make a lot of noise about high tech, then hire h1bs to do routine IT work their corporate customers do.
- sublinear 6mo agoTheir corporate customers also do that to their own customers.
- coredog64 6mo agoThat's Kyndryl: They spun it off into it's own entity after "IBM Global Services" had such a (deservedly) poor reputation that they were scraping the bottom of the barrel for clients and employees. Not that Kyndryl is any better, but it's enough of a rebrand that you might fool decision makers for the few minutes that it takes to get them to buy in.
- pjmlp 6mo agoAlso buy Red-Hat and in the process own quite a few FOSS projects.
- pjmlp 6mo agoA business model that currently the Linux ecosystem benefits from, between Linux kernel, GCC, Wayland, GNOME, systemd, Java, Go, Rust.
- fsckboy 6mo agothey've just spun off the first quantum computer pure-play, the highest of techs, the greenest of green-fields, and your observation is "IBM doesn't do this"
- amelius 6mo agoFirst? Europeans are already producing quantum processors at research scale, soon industrial scale. https://quantware.com/news/quantware-raises-178-million https://quantware.com/news/quantware-raises-178-million
- coredog64 6mo agoFinally, I can factor 21 at an industrial scale!
- andrewstuart 6mo agoIBM is such a weird company what even IS IBM these days? For the most part it seems to be rent-a-programmer “consulting”. But then articles like this come up where they seem to still have research capability. They bailed out of pc hardware long ago, do they still do mainframes - maybe mainframes don’t exist any more?
- AlotOfReading 6mo agoIBM still sells extremely POWERful systems, but they don't seem particularly interested in expanding the market. I once had a conversation with a director of that division about why it wasn't on the market. It basically came down to the existing customers being willing to pay such exorbitant amounts for each system after all the support contracts that "normal" markups like Nvidia and Intel enjoy were too paltry in comparison.
- throwawaypath 6mo agoThey also charge you for every instruction cycle on the machines (look up MIPS licensing) you own. Imagine if NVIDIA started doing that with their GPUs: spend $2500 on a GPU and then pay NVIDIA a royalty fee for every hour of workload you put on it.
- kev009 6mo agoTwo different product lines. POWER systems are sold by the socket, on the higher end sometimes you get some license disabled cores but it's usually trivial. Mainframes are the opposite, you usually get the full monty machine that is extremely limited by licensing.
- alienbaby 6mo agothey've also still got their storage stuff. I always wondered why that isn't doing better, it seemed pretty damn good when I've ended up working iwth it.
- Scubabear68 6mo agoI am not surprised, but disappointed, to see something like the CHIPS Act be used for something which is still in ultra-super-unbelievably-early-research-phase. Put more candidly, something not currently useful like Quantum computing. Looks like just a handout to IBM.
- osnium123 6mo agoThe administration fired the original CHIPs Act team and so the new team might not be up to speed.
- izanton 6mo agoI don't really understand how quantum chips work, but it's so interesting and cool (or it's not)
- ktallett 6mo agoIt massively depends on what type of quantum chip it is, so often the confusion is that there is no one specific method. Especially as we are too early in the development cycle to have a clear winner (although Photonic computing is gaining traction).
- izanton 6mo agoI try to follow the motto of my university quantum physics professor: if you feel like quantum mechanics is making you more certain you understand it, you’re probably wrong and need to start over. But as I understand it, the most "basic" approach now with qubit-based computers is to select the most popular answer across many runs and treat it as the "right" one.
- DivingForGold 6mo agoBet this got Elon Musk's attention, his dreams about his TerraFab.
- _s_a_m_ 6mo agoIBM does not disappoint with their yearly meme posts about AI and Quantum and what not
- bluesounddirect 6mo agoI would like to believe this is a cover story for IBM to make parts for the DoD latest weapon . I would like to imagine its a cover to make parts for some new government super computer. But its IBM its probably nothing even close to that . Its more likely a nice way to get the stock back at $315 and make nothing.
- alsetmusic 6mo agoUS's big bet on quantum computing may not be entirely legal[0] 0. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/05/uss-big-bet-on-quantum-computing-may-not-be-entirely-legal/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/05/uss-big-bet-on-q...
- archonis 6mo agoI wonder how many people IBM will layoff to celebrate this one.