Few people can claim to have been part of building the quantum computing industry globally; Robert Sutor is one of them.
Sutor spent 39 years at US tech giant IBM, and from 2017 led the company’s research efforts in quantum computing. Under his leadership, IBM became a world-leader in the sector: the company was the first to make a quantum computer publicly available on the internet in 2016, and it now has more quantum devices and users than any other company in the sector.
Sutor then joined US quantum scaleup Infleqtion in 2022, before moving to the UK last month to join the board of directors of Cambridge-based startup Nu Quantum, which builds technology that allows quantum computers to network with one another. And he believes that the industry is entering a new phase of development — one driven by startups.
“My view ranges from that of a massive company pumping millions and millions of dollars in their quantum programmes, to that of smaller companies,” Sutor tells Sifted.
“And the teaser here is that quantum computing is simply not going to scale unless we have the types of technologies that [startups like] Nu Quantum are pioneering.”
“Quantum computing is taking longer than going to the moon”
Sutor compares the race to build a fully-fledged quantum computer to former US president John F. Kennedy pledging in 1961 to land a man on the moon by the end of that decade.
“In fact, that only took about eight years,” he says. “So quantum computing is taking longer than going to the moon.”
The US space programme started in 1958 with a first phase called Mercury — a series of one-man flights in space. “Mercury was all about: ‘What kind of rocket do we need?’,” says Sutor. “They tried solid fuel, liquid fuel, etc. It was just: ‘Let’s try everything that looks interesting.’
“I think most quantum computing companies are in that very first phase.”
In the past decade companies have focused on the bigger challenge at hand, says Sutor: figuring out how to build a large-scale quantum computer. Promising companies in both the US and Europe have been launched with different approaches to achieving this.
In practice, companies are looking at different ways to create qubits — the tiny particles that carry quantum information inside quantum computers. IBM’s quantum computers are based on electrons called superconducting qubits, for instance; Cambridge-based scaleup Quantinuum uses trapped ions while French company Pasqal works with neutral atoms.
Sutor doesn’t believe that one approach will win the race. Instead, he says, it’s likely that different types of qubits will be more useful for specific use cases.
It doesn’t mean that all companies in the sector will make it. “We’re still in a golden period, where everybody thinks everything is possible,” says Sutor. “But at some point, people are going to have to say: ‘Maybe this approach isn’t quite working.’”
The role of quantum startups
Sutor thinks quantum computing is comparatively at the start of the second phase of the space programme, Gemini — a series of space missions that occurred between 1964-66 that were intended to test various equipment and procedures.
“This was the punch list,” says Sutor. “How do we dock spacecraft? How do we do spacewalks? One by one, they were going through the technologies to ‘scale’.”
In quantum terms, “maybe you have a lot of qubits, but can’t do a lot with them; maybe you have great qubits, but you don’t have enough of them,” says Sutor.
“How are they going to overcome this? Well, it’s the startups that are really tackling the smaller types of problems.”
Sutor says that this is why he joined the board of Nu Quantum, whose networking technology is designed to enable quantum computers to scale faster.
“The world is going to be littered with tiny little quantum computers that aren’t big enough to do anything interesting unless we have the type of networking that our company is doing,” says Sutor.
This month, Nu Quantum announced a partnership with the UK’s National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC) to build a network of quantum processors over the next four years. The startup was previously awarded a contract by the UK government to build a ‘quantum data centre’ based on its networking technology, for which it has partnered with US telecoms giant Cisco.
A number of startups have emerged to address quantum computing’s ‘punch list’. In the UK, Riverlane builds the components and software needed to correct the errors made by quantum computers; Orange Quantum Systems in the Netherlands develops equipment that analyses the performance of quantum processors; and German company Pixel Photonics builds the devices that can generate photonic qubits, which form the basis of some quantum computers.
Europe’s quantum scene
In this young ecosystem, Sutor says that Europe has a role to play. “I think [the European ecosystem] is extremely relevant,” he says.
He points to companies like Paris-based Pasqal and the UK’s Oxford Quantum Circuits, which have now started selling and delivering quantum computers to customers. “That’s a major milestone,” says Sutor.
Last year, quantum startups in EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) raised $781m — more than three times the amount raised in the sector in North America ($240m), according to a study from Finnish startup IQM Quantum Computers, and deeptech VCs OpenOcean and Lakestar.
Much of this comes down to government efforts. The UK, through its National Quantum Strategy, has committed a total of £3.5bn to quantum technologies, while Germany has pledged over €3bn. These come on top of EU-wide initiatives such as the Quantum Technologies Flagship, which has a €1bn budget funded by the bloc.
Nu Quantum’s founder Carmen Palacios-Berraquero says: “In quantum, the government is still the main customer and that will be the case for a few years. And in terms of government support, European countries have been really amazing.”
“[European countries] are very aggressive,” says Sutor. “There’s a lot of sovereign pride.
“I think part of that is based on the fact that US companies have dominated the history of the classical computer. So people are saying: ‘Not this time’.”
The biggest risk, according to Sutor, is to see sovereign pride prevail over the need to see quantum companies across the world cooperate to solve industry-wide challenges.
It’s not just about creating a host of startups that address the challenges of quantum computing; these companies have to work together.
“[Countries] are going to have to look beyond individual borders,” says Sutor. “If you’re going to be successful, you have to really let the required technology flow, let the right people flow.”
The funding gap
It is also a case of letting the right money flow. While funding from European governments has successfully supported the early growth of quantum startups in the region, it can only go so far.
Nu Quantum last raised a €10.2m seed in November 2023 and is currently looking to close a €50m Series A in Q1 2025.
“We might suffer when we get to the big scale-up moment where we need hundreds of millions, not tens of millions,” says Palacios-Berraquero. “That’s where it becomes part of what is normal in the US, but it’s unusual territory in Europe.”
In July, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) launched a new challenge intended to identify companies most likely to successfully develop an ‘industrially useful quantum computer’; the selected candidate can expect up to $300m.
It’s not only the public sector: hundreds of millions of dollars are being thrown at the quantum computing sector by Big Tech companies in the US, like IBM, Google, Microsoft and Amazon.
“As the market takes off, these companies will be able to invest orders of magnitude more,” says Palacios-Berraquero.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/robert-sutor-quantum-ibm-nu-interview/
