Good old IBM is leading the way in the race for 'quantum advantage'

Deep in the bowels of a lab older than the internet itself, engineers have been toiling away at an enormous scientific and engineering challenge: How to create the hardware poised to set off the next tech frenzy.

- Christopher Mims

That lab, owned by IBM, is in pole position in a new race between Big Blue, Google, Microsoft and a horde of startups. Their goal? "Quantum advantage"-the point at which quantum computers exceed the abilities of the best conventional ones. Yes, good old IBM is holding its own with the trillion-dollar competition.

IBM hasn't been associated with breakthrough innovation since its Watson AI won "Jeopardy!" in 2011. But quantum computing, which could see a breakthrough to commercialization by 2030, gives the 114- year-old stalwart of business computing a chance to reclaim some of its past glory.

It is working on larger clusters of quantum chips that it expects will enable large-scale computing in the next five years. In just the past month, the company announced a partnership with chip maker AMD to develop "quantum-centric supercomputers" and an update to its program to certify quantum developers.

Meanwhile, a deal frenzy among quantum computing startups saw nearly $2 billion injected into the field.

Bringing 'big iron' back

The stakes are high. Quantum computers have the potential to defeat the encryption on which everything from passwords to bitcoin depends. They could also speed up the solution of the optimization problems that vex logistics companies and militaries alike. Eventually, owing to their ability to simulate matter at the subatomic scale, boosters say quantum computers could lead to breakthroughs in every area of materials science, medicine and agriculture.

They work by leveraging the quantum characteristics of matter at the atomic level. In theory, they can do some kinds of calculations billions of times faster than conventional computers.