IBM Spins Off the First Pure-Play Quantum Chip Foundry
futurumgroup.com90 points by rbanffy 8 hours ago
90 points by rbanffy 8 hours ago
Seems 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-...
> Seems 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 understanding your logic, can you explain?
What I see with the program and amounts companies were awarded is some level of acknowledgment of the current state of quantum research (i.e. IBM is generally considered the leader) and their pragmatic approach that piggy-backs on current technologies (for obvious speed+cost benefits).
I 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...
I 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?
Well ya, it’s an Indian IT sweatshop at this point.
I 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.
financial companies have always been sweatshops but it wasnt the case for IBM before dot com.
The 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.
Is there enough agreement regarding what is a quantum chip, and what process technology is necessary to make one?
I 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.
I'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.
Is there any agreement regarding real applications that warrant fab volume or is this still speculation?
There is high agreement on what the real applications of Quantum computing are. Unfortunately these projects are basically useless when it comes to them.
Can 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?
I 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.
I 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.
> 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.
> There is high agreement on what the real applications of Quantum computing are.
and what are those applications?
The most obvious one is SIGINT agencies breaking RSA, DSA, ECDSA, ECDH, etc.
Of course, the plan is by the time quantum computers become capable of breaking those algorithms in practice, the industry will have moved to post-quantum cryptography algorithms.
But there will still be legacy systems which haven't, and also encrypted data recorded in the past in the expectation they'd be able to decrypt it in the future.
- better simultion of quantum systems (this is the actual important one despite nobody seeming to care)
- breaking a lot of traditional public key crypto (this gets a lot of attention, but its not that big a deal because there are alternatives)
- in theory i guess quadratic improvement on unstructured search. I think its unlikely to be practically relavent.
This 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.
A bailout for a company that stopped innovating and instead has been inventing new ways to create middle management and bureaucracy.
So much for capitalism.
Can the chips they plan to make there run Shor?
If they could in any meaningful way, i'm pretty sure the press release would have lead with that.
The 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-qu...
Two questions:
-do the chips help with inference?
-can you run Doom on the chips?
Being for quantum computing, the answer is both yes and no. You need to collapse the wave function to pick one.
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