IBM Spins Off the First Pure-Play Quantum Chip Foundry (futurumgroup.com)
96 points by rbanffy 8 hours ago
mathattack 14 minutes ago
Interesting. My observation on IBM is their entire business model is:
1 - Audit your customers
2 - Buy back shares
3 - Force early retirements
It was easy to see why Watson failed in that environment. The revenue was “We’ll let you out of the $6mm audit bill if you buy $2mm of Watson”. Companies would agree, install better asset management, and never put Watson into production.
I couldn’t imagine Quantum Comouting surviving there. Spinning it off the best play.
rr808 8 minutes ago
Their business model is more like make a lot of noise about high tech, then hire h1bs to do routine IT work their corporate customers do.
postalcoder 2 hours ago
Seems like tacit acknowledgment that IBM mothership is not the right place for a speculative growth play from both a management and capital perspective.
I’m not IBMologist but I do remember how IBM pushed Watson when it was clear that upper management had no idea what Watson actually was. Regardless of the viability of the underlying technology, it’s best to keep such things away from the consultants.
Also, article is very difficult to read. Bad typeface, spacing, coherence and prose. I found the press release less strained.
https://newsroom.ibm.com/ibm-and-u-s-department-of-commerce-...
RaftPeople 21 minutes ago
> Seems like tacit acknowledgment that IBM mothership is not the right place for a speculative growth play from both a management and capital perspective.
I'm not understanding your logic, can you explain?
What I see with the program and amounts companies were awarded is some level of acknowledgment of the current state of quantum research (i.e. IBM is generally considered the leader) and their pragmatic approach that piggy-backs on current technologies (for obvious speed+cost benefits).
Traubenfuchs an hour ago
I remember when watson was touted as soon to be replacement for doctors more than 10 years ago…
https://www.henricodolfing.ch/en/case-study-20-the-4-billion...
MichaelZuo an hour ago
I don’t understand why IBM never tried to make amends and reclaim their former credibility somehow.
Do IBM decison makers intentionally want to have that hang over the whole firm and be the butt of jokes?
horns4lyfe 2 hours ago
Well ya, it’s an Indian IT sweatshop at this point.
senthil_rajasek an hour ago
I now work in an I.T dept of a financial company in U.S and I've also worked at software companies in India.
They are all sweatshops these days.
winfredJa an hour ago
madanparas 6 hours ago
The real story isn't the $2B. It's that the foundry is standalone, so other quantum hardware companies can use it. Shared infrastructure beats nine separate research cleanrooms.
Zigurd 5 hours ago
Is there enough agreement regarding what is a quantum chip, and what process technology is necessary to make one?
rbanffy 3 hours ago
I guess it's a balance. If you think their process makes workable chips for your designs, then you can use it. If you can't adapt your design to what they can build, then you need to build your own foundry. Chances are a reliable supplier will push the market in the direction of their process.
If we had someone making GaAs processors in the 1980s for a price competitive with their silicon counterparts and with a long-term roadmap, we'd have very different computers now. And some extra toxic waste problems.
ghaff 4 hours ago
I've been out of the space for a bit. IBM has been betting on the engineered superconducting approach, which makes sense given their background, but there are other options, often for potentially different problem areas. Need to dive back in.
imglorp 5 hours ago
Is there any agreement regarding real applications that warrant fab volume or is this still speculation?
bawolff 5 hours ago
caminante 4 hours ago
This is a pro-IBM piece.
I'm surprised it has zero mention of potential advantages of trapped ion despite being superior on stability windows, accuracy, and operating temps.
I also appreciate the disclosure about AI generated content, but this article gets too repetitive.
ArchieScrivener 3 hours ago
A bailout for a company that stopped innovating and instead has been inventing new ways to create middle management and bureaucracy.
So much for capitalism.
dvh 5 hours ago
Can the chips they plan to make there run Shor?
upofadown 12 minutes ago
From the article:
>IBM is developing four custom ASICs — a decoder, a two-qubit gate controller, a single-qubit controller, and an amplifier — designed to handle quantum control at scale, with these circuits expected to converge around 2029 at the point where power consumption becomes manageable at up to 3 megawatts per system.
The current hotness seems to be based on creating pairs of entangled qubits based on what might be realistically achieved with error correction. Shor's requires thousands of entangled qubits (something like 4000 for 2K RSA and 1500 for 256 bit elliptic curves).
So unless someone comes up with a way to break cryptography using pairs of entangled qubits then this probably isn't relevant.
bawolff 4 hours ago
If they could in any meaningful way, i'm pretty sure the press release would have lead with that.
DeathArrow 3 hours ago
Two questions:
-do the chips help with inference?
-can you run Doom on the chips?
rbanffy 3 hours ago
Being for quantum computing, the answer is both yes and no. You need to collapse the wave function to pick one.
stogot 6 hours ago
The article talks about IBM spreading bets to other techniques. Reminds me to ponder again. Has Microsoft retracted their sketchy quantum claims about inventing new states of matter in the past year? https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2025/03/12/microsofts-qu...