Google has unveiled its new Quantum AI campus in Santa Barbara, California, where engineers and scientists will be working on its first commercial quantum computer, but that will probably be a decade way.
The new campus has a focus on both software and hardware. On the latter front, these include its first quantum data center, quantum hardware research labs, and Google's own quantum processor chip fabrication facilities, said Erik Lucero, lead engineer for Google Quantum AI, in a blogpost.
"Within the decade, Google aims to build a useful, error-corrected quantum computer. This will accelerate solutions for some of the world's most pressing problems, like sustainable energy and reduced emissions to feed the world's growing population, and unlocking new scientific discoveries, like more helpful AI," he said.
On the software side, it's got the Cirq Python library for optimizing quantum circuits and running that code on quantum computers and quantum simulators, as well as the OpenFermion library for compiling quantum algorithms, and TensorFlow Quantum, a quantum machine learning library.
Lucero said Google is "working to build an error-corrected quantum computer for the world."
"To get there, we must build the world's first 'quantum transistor'—two error-corrected 'logical qubits' performing quantum operations together—and then figure out how to tile hundreds to thousands of them to form the error-corrected quantum computer. That will take years," he wrote.
Google kicked off its Quantum AI Lab in 2014 as a collaboration with NASA Ames Research Center, the Universities Space Research Association and the University of California Santa Barbara.
Jeff Dean, senior vice president of Google Research and Health said that Google should be able to build an error-correcting qubit within 2 years.