Amazon Unveils First Quantum Computing Chip

Amazon (AMZN) on Thursday unveiled its first quantum computing chip, about a week after rival Microsoft  (MSFT) announced its first chip devoted to the nascent technology.

The new chip, called Ocelot, can cut the “costs of implementing quantum error correction by up to 90%, compared to current approaches,” according to Amazon’s cloud computing platform Amazon Web Services.

Quantum chips empower quantum computers to handle operations at speeds exponentially higher than conventional computers and with much less energy consumption.

Despite recent breakthroughs, useful quantum computers remain many years off. Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang said in early January that it would likely be more than 15 years before the world had “very useful” quantum computers. Google parent Alphabet (GOOGL) unveiled its quantum computing chip Willow in December and said it represented just the second of six milestones on its quantum computing roadmap. Meanwhile, Microsoft said its chip, Majorana 1, could facilitate quantum computing “capable of solving meaningful, industrial-scale problems in years, not decades.”

Even Amazon said Thursday that Ocelot is “still” a prototype. 

“We’re just getting started and we believe we have several more stages of scaling to go through,” Oskar Painter, AWS director of Quantum Hardware, said. “It’s a very tough problem to tackle.”

Amazon shares are roughly flat Thursday morning and have gained about 23% in the past year.