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Google hopes to build a useful quantum computer by 2029

First stop: supremancy. Next stop: normality.

​Google's new Quantum AI campus in Santa Barbara.

Google's new Quantum AI campus in Santa Barbara.

Image: Google

Google has announced that it aims to build a "useful, error-corrected quantum computer" within the decade, which it hopes could be used to tackle big problems relating climate change and advance scientific progress.

As part of the announcement, yesterday the company unveiled its new Quantum AI campus in Santa Barbara. It will be home to the company's first quantum data center, its quantum hardware research laboratories, and quantum processor chip fabrication facilities. The push comes about 18 months after Google first claimed to have demonstrated quantum supremacy — performing a task that can't be matched by the most powerful computers we have today.

"We are at this inflection point," Hartmut Neven, the scientist leading Google's Quantum AI program, told The Wall Street Journal. "We now have the important components in hand that make us confident. We know how to execute the road map."

Want to know more about quantum computing? Here's our guide to the revolutionary technology and what it means for your business, now and in the future.

 Jamie Condliffe

Jamie Condliffe ( @jme_c) is the executive editor at Protocol, based in London. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, he worked on the business desk at The New York Times, where he edited the DealBook newsletter and wrote Bits, the weekly tech newsletter. He has previously worked at MIT Technology Review, Gizmodo, and New Scientist, and has held lectureships at the University of Oxford and Imperial College London. He also holds a doctorate in engineering from the University of Oxford.

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