Amazon Throws Its Hat Into the Quantum Computing Ring (AMZN)

E-commerce giant Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) announced on Monday its entrance into the commercial quantum computing market with Braket, a fully managed Amazon Web Services (AWS) quantum computing service that allows scientists, researchers, and developers (devs) to begin experimenting with qubits and quantum circuit.

According to a news release, Braket, a service that draws many parallels to Microsoft’s Azure Quantum, will let devs design and test out their quantum algorithms and basic apps on multiple quantum hardware providers using Amazon’s new service. It is worth pointing out that Braket is essentially a unified interface. Unlike Google or IBM, Amazon didn’t actually build its own quantum computer. Instead, it partnered with D-Wave, IonQ and Rigetti and made their respective systems – annealing superconductor computers, ion trap computers and gate based superconductor computers – available through its cloud.

Bill Vass, AWS’vice-president of engineering, told Computer Weekly that users “don’t have to…go buy a machine or set up, or evaluate iterations or set up a partnership or any of those kinds of things. They just select to use it and it shows up on their AWS bill just like any other compute resource. It just looks like any other component in the cloud to them…,” he said.

According to Vass, users can start previewing the machines now. Then, starting Dec. 16, Amazon will begin running jobs with interested parties “on a first-come, first-served” basis.

Vass also said that with these early machines, devs will get about 32 qubits available and “be able to – on the annealing side – do some good, optimisation algorithms.”

He noted Braket will enter general availability during the first half of 2020.

Stock Price Action

Amazon shares were trading down by about 12 points at $1,769.96 at the time of publication Wednesday.

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