California’s Silicon Valley may rule the roost for internet startups, and Kendall Square in the Boston area may set the pace for the biotech industry, but could the Pacific Northwest leap into the lead for quantum computing?
Experts who are exploring one of the computing world’s hottest frontiers say there’s a chance that Seattle could become the heart of a “Quantum Valley” — but it could take years for the promise of quantum computing to pay off.
“I’d say we’re on the order of a decade plus before we start to see this start to really materialize,” said Louis Terminello, associate laboratory director for physical and computational sciences at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
Terminello is among the authors of a recent commentary calling for increased public investment to solidify the Pacific Northwest as home of the nation’s pre-eminent regional cluster for research and development in quantum information science — in short, Quantum Valley.
The Seattle area has been there before: as Jet City, by virtue of Boeing’s dominance in commercial aviation; as Satellite City, by virtue of the satellite factories built by SpaceX, Amazon, LeoStella and Xplore; and as Cloud City, by virtue of the leading roles played by Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure in cloud computing.
University of Washington physicist Kai-Mei Fu, director of UW’s Quantum Defects Lab, said leadership in cloud computing could provide an advantage in the quest for quantum supremacy. “We know that access to machines is going to be through the cloud,” Fu said. “And then the question is, how important will it be for the hardware to be near the software teams physically?”
‘The world is interested. Why not here? There’s no place better.’
Billions of dollars are at stake, although precise projections for the quantum computing market are shrouded in uncertainty. That’s fitting, not only because Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is a pillar of quantum physics, but also because full-fledged quantum computers aren’t yet ready for prime time.
Estimates of the current global market value range from less than $500 million to more than $10 billion. But across the board, analysts typically put the growth rate at more than 30% annually.
The Pacific Northwest isn’t the only region angling to lay a claim to Quantum Valley. Quantum physicist Charles Marcus, who recently left Microsoft and the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen to join UW’s faculty, noted that Silicon Valley, Boston and Chicago, Yale and Princeton are all revving up regional quantum initiatives.
“They’re going great guns,” Marcus said. “They’re having the same conversations that we’re having right now, but there is not a dominant region of the country, nor a dominant university and environment that has become this thing. And so you look around and you say, it’s important. It’s a focus area of United States interest. It’s unquestionably fascinating from an intellectual point of view. It’s got a business future. The world is interested. Why not here? There’s no place better.”
So what will it take to claim the Quantum Valley title? In honor of World Quantum Day, here’s a look at the road ahead for academic research, business development and government backing.
Academic research
Unlike the classical approach to computing, the quantum approach takes advantage of a weird corner of physics where a single bit, or qubit, can represent more than one value until the results are read out.
Theoretically, this approach can solve some types of problems far more efficiently than the classical approach — for example, optimizing complex systems … or designing molecules for pharmaceuticals, fertilizers, fuel-cell catalysts and other new materials … or simulating phenomena ranging from climate change to market behavior. But in order to do all that, researchers first have to optimize how quantum computing hardware works.
That means studying the various materials from which quantum computers can be made, ranging from superconducting circuits to trapped ions to microscopic diamonds with built-in defects.
“Materials science is very strong at the University of Washington historically,” Fu said. “And then photonics has gotten extremely strong since I’ve been here.”
‘If you look around the country, the world, we are really short on a quantum workforce.’
Five years ago, UW established a program called QuantumX to add to the ranks of its researchers and accelerate progress in quantum information science, aided by federal funding. Another focus of UW’s efforts is the Quantum Training Training and Testbed Lab, known as the QT(3) Lab.
“If you look around the country, the world, we are really short on a quantum workforce,” said Nancy Allbritton, dean of UW’s College of Engineering. “Our quantum training test bed could be a critical part of the infrastructure in this area. It’s all about growing the workforce. So we’ve got some ground compared to other regions of the world.”
Marcus said UW may be the Pacific Northwest’s flagship when it comes to quantum research and training, but it isn’t the only ship in the fleet.
“Let’s not forget Washington State University and its relationship with PNNL, and Oregon State, and the University of Oregon,” he said. “Dave Wineland — Nobel laureate and one of the inventors of ion-based quantum computing — just moved from NIST to the University of Oregon. I think it’s going to be easy to light this place up. I mean, it’s kind of lit already.”
Industry development
Seattle’s twin titans of cloud computing leapt into quantum computing long ago: Microsoft researchers have been working in the field for decades, and in 2019, CEO Satya Nadella took the wraps off a cloud-based service called Azure Quantum. Weeks later, Amazon Web Services unveiled its quantum cloud platform, Amazon Braket. Both companies provide cloud access to a smorgasbord of quantum processors, including the trapped-ion devices built by Maryland-based IonQ.
IonQ has a substantial presence in the Seattle area — and that presence will get even more substantial when the company opens a 65,000-square-foot research and manufacturing facility in Bothell, Wash. IonQ’s CEO and president, Peter Chapman, says the factory should go into full operation next year as part of a plan to invest $1 billion in the Pacific Northwest over a span of 10 years.
“The Seattle area is pretty nice, in that it has access to highly trained personnel that we can recruit from, and it has available real estate that is maybe not as overpriced as downtown San Francisco or Menlo Park,” said IonQ chief financial officer Thomas Kramer. “And we already have a critical base for employees who are working from Seattle. That meant that this was an easy decision, particularly when we went through and we found what we think is an ideal location in Bothell.”
The Pacific Northwest also benefits from strong collaborations linking academic, commercial and government interests, said Krysta Svore, Microsoft’s vice president of advanced quantum development..
“Some of the largest software and technology companies in the world are located here in the Pacific Northwest,” she said in emailed comments. “It will take financial, personnel and community investments, such as continued research and development from businesses, an influx of talent from many of the region’s colleges and universities, and support and partnerships from local governments to strengthen the area’s quantum ecosystem.”
‘It’s too early to even think about who’s going to win, and at what cost.’
Sebastian Hassinger, principal specialist at AWS for Amazon Braket, agrees that the Pacific Northwest has a lot to offer in the quantum computing race. But he also says the race is just getting started.
“It’s still open science and open source, and so in a sense, it’s in that pre-competitive phase of the industry,” Hassinger said. “So I think it’s too early to even think about who’s going to win, and at what cost. It’s really just like everybody is with their shoulder behind this boulder.”
Marcus compared the current state of quantum computing to the Cambrian explosion, an age more than 500 million years ago marked by a proliferation of species. “There’s all these weird animals, some with eyeballs on the ends of antennas coming out of their heads, and eventually they get weeded out because a lot of them are relatively unviable,” he said.
Similarly, all the different approaches to quantum computing — trapped ions, diamond defects, superconducting circuits and who knows what else — will find their proper evolutionary niches, or die out. “I think that what’s going to happen over the next 10 to 20 years is that, rather than policy deciding what are the standards, there’s going to be a kind of winnowing, and that people are going to move to technologies that look like they’re winning,” he said.
What worries Marcus is that there may be too many big dinosaurs and not enough small mammals in the Pacific Northwest’s quantum ecosystem. Companies headquartered in Seattle aren’t typically found on lists of the top quantum startups. (You can, however, find two companies based in Vancouver, B.C.: D-Wave Systems, which went public last year, and 1QBit.)
“In Quantum Valley, there should not just be the big players, the behemoths around the town. There should be a whole series of little companies, just like we saw — I’m going to say it — in the last century, in Silicon Valley,” he said. “That, I think, is something which is a little different from the Seattle spirit, because the Seattle spirit to me looks like there’s these great big companies out there. But not, as far as I can see yet, a startup culture.”
Government support
Quantum computing has been high on the federal government’s tech agenda for years, and in 2018, the National Quantum Initiative Act authorized $1.2 billion over the course of five years to support research and development.
One of the beneficiaries of that backing is Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. In 2019, PNNL joined forces with Microsoft and UW to create the Northwest Quantum Nexus — and since then, the regional R&D hub has added Washington State University, IonQ, the University of Oregon, Amazon Web Services and Boeing.
“You’re going to have these players all wanting to come together in a way that will tap into expertise … from universities, and from a place like PNNL,” Terminello said.
PNNL’s traditional skill set overlaps nicely with the needs for advancing quantum information science.
“Some of the challenges that we see in quantum are very similar to some of the challenges you see in battery science and battery technology,” Terminello said. “And so I think that there are a lot of strengths that we bring from that vantage point in the energy sciences and in the energy technology development arena.”
PNNL has already helped IonQ develop a reliable supply chain for the barium ions that the company plans to use in its next-generation computer hardware — and Terminello hinted that there are similar public-private projects in the works.
“You have to invent new materials,” he said. “You have to make them with such precision and exactness that they behave well in a quantum environment. And this ecosystem here in the Northwest, I think, is well-suited for that challenge.”
‘Legislators need to understand what is quantum, and what does that actually mean?’
Nearly five years after the National Quantum Initiative Act was signed into law, the CHIPS and Science Act is offering a fresh round of federal funding to keep the field moving ahead. Just this week, the University of Washington said it would ask for $250 million from the Department of Defense to establish an expanded Pacific Northwest Quantum Hub.
Backers of the proposal include PNNL, Washington State University, Boise State University, the University of Oregon and tech companies including Amazon, Intel, IonQ, Micron Technology and Microsoft.
Meanwhile, Washington state legislators are getting up to speed. “Legislators need to understand what is quantum, and what does that actually mean?” said state Rep. Vandana Slatter, who’s the founder and co-chair of the Science, Technology and Innovation Caucus.
Last December, a report from the Workforce Education Investment Accountability and Oversight Board highlighted a UW proposal to allocate $6 million in state funding to support quantum information science. The proposal didn’t get sufficient traction during this year’s legislative session, but it could come up again next year.
Slatter, D-Bellevue, wants to focus on workforce development.
“One of my personal interests is that this should be an equitable opportunity, for people who have not typically seen themselves in post-secondary, high-demand computing or tech careers,” she said. “We also want to be able to provide access to everyone in our state — people who are in rural areas, first-generation students, underrepresented or marginalized as well. So we see the importance of creating equitable pathways to these jobs.”
Beyond the lab
When it comes to attracting tech talent, it isn’t always about the work.
Eight years ago, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk told an audience of engineers in Seattle that he was putting his satellite factory in the Pacific Northwest because “a lot of you guys, it seems, don’t want to move to L.A.” Marcus — who left Denmark to join UW’s faculty in Seattle — said the Pacific Northwest’s appeal might give it an edge in the Quantum Valley competition as well.
“You know, the Pacific Northwest is not the only area in the country that’s gunning for this title of Quantum Valley,” he said. “Look, it’s not an accident that it’s also unbelievably beautiful, and that people would move here in a heartbeat, and that a lot of other places are more difficult to live in and less attractive as a place to live. So it won’t be hard getting people to move here.”
