In the current market, the likes of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft dominate the cloud computing industry. Alone, the three companies account for nearly 60%o of the $88 billion in revenue that the industry generates on a yearly basis. Recently, Rigetti Computing unveiled its plan to take on these competitors and establish its own name in the cloud computing industry.
Primarily, Regetti Computing aims to claim a share of the industry by being the first cloud computing service which is powered by quantum computing. By definition, quantum computing is computing which uses any sort of mechanical phenomena, like superposition or entanglement. For the past few months, they have announced continuous development and advancements in quantum processors. Friday of this past week, they officially announced that they had finally reached a point where they could bring the power of those processors to use in one platform. They have officially called the platform the Rigetti Quantum Cloud Services.
In addition to the platform, Rigetti announced an innovative competition. The competition, which is called the Quantum Advantage Prize, is offering $1 million to the winner. The winner will be the individual or team that can most effectively demonstrate the business benefit of the new quantum processing cloud service. The competition has not officially started yet, but the details will be announced in October. Rigetti told Forbes that “the first demonstrations of quantum advantage will be a historical scientific milestone. There’s a significant amount of challenging, fun and hard work to do, and we want to engage in that as a broader community.”
Beyond the competition and platform, Rigetti also announced new partnerships to continue developing quantum applications. The partnerships are with 1QBit, Heisenberg, and Zapata Computing.
The end goal of their cloud computing services is to provide a clear alternative to the largest players on the market. The current players, which are Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, do not utilize quantum-based platforms. The biggest problem for Rigetti is getting the quantum computing up to the scale of those competitors. Other large companies, like Oracle, IBM, and Alibaba have made moves to get into the cloud computing service but have done so with little success. Rather than building internally, these companies have focused on acquisitions and allowed the cloud computing service to be a huge part of their earnings calls. Rigetti Computing is taking a different approach. On the other hand, Rigetti Computing understands that getting quantum computing up to speed is not a short-term process, but rather, it will take more than a decade to get up to speed. Similarly, they are not going about acquiring capital or assets, but are trying to build a community of supporters to push their product forward. They believe that the $1 million competition is a cheap price to pay to show that their solution is truly viable.
While only time will tell if the Quantum Cloud Services platform will reach long-term success, it has served as both a catalyst and disruptor for cloud industry as a whole.
