Alibaba Cloud steps up its game as it offers quantum computing service
Becomes second company after IBM to launch a quantum computer with processing power of more than 10 qubits
Alibaba Cloud on Friday launched the world’s second-most powerful quantum computing service on the cloud after IBM in association with the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
While Alibaba Cloud’s quantum computer is capable of processing 11 quantum bits (qubits), IBM launched a 20-qubit computer last November.
Shi Yaoyun, chief quantum technology scientist at Alibaba Cloud, said that the launch of the quantum computing service will make it easier for the team to experiment with processors and better understand the hardware required, as well as develop quantum tools and software.
As the kinds of processes and calculations get more complex to compute, quantum computers are often seen as a solution that can help process such calculations much quicker than classical computers.
For example, cracking a complex password via brute force could take a classical computer years, but with a quantum computer, it could just take a few seconds.