Ask HN: How are quantum computing companies making money?

7 points·Gooblebrai··6 comments

I'm not very familiar with Quantum computing, but isn't the field in a somewhat state of research? How are all these companies making money?

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The smart ones are small teams who seek out piecemeal contracts with the federal government to work on focused projects of limited scope.

The dumb ones are burning through hundreds of millions of dollars of VC money blowing up their teams in some sort of gold rush where there haven't been any discoveries of gold yet.

Wait, which are the smart ones and which are the dumb ones again?

It depends on how you look at things. If all you care about is monetary gain, than burning through VC money and cashing out as much as you can along the way is likely to be personally more enriching.

But if you care about advancing a technology, moving the world forward, not needlessly wasting resources, etc...than the small group is obviously a more ideal structure.

In my opinion they don’t. They are either startups, depending on various sources of investment, or they are big companies like Microsoft and Nvidia, who are already established, have large teams and can afford to invest heavily into RnD. At this point of quantum computing development, none of these efforts has paid off yet. Could take some years to get to the point of commercial use at scale to get actual return on investment.

I know a QC startup that sells software to compute simulations using classical methods on HPCs, but with the promise that once QC is available they will add QC acceleration.

The same way Bletchley park did - by entities with unlimited money interested in unlimited criptograpy strength.

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