About D-Wave

Despite the incredible power of today’s supercomputers, many complex computing problems cannot be addressed by conventional systems. The huge growth of data and our need to better understand everything from the universe to our own DNA leads us to seek newtools that can help provide answers. Quantum computing is the next frontier in computing, providing an entirely new approach to solving the world’s most difficult problems.

While certainly not easy, much progress has been made in the field of quantum computingsince 1981, when Feynman gave his famous lecture at the California Institute of Technology. Still a relatively young field, quantum computing is complex and different approaches are being pursued around the world. Today, there are two leading candidate architectures for quantum computers: gate model and quantum annealing. In gate model quantum computing, the aim is to control and manipulate the evolution of the quantum states overtime—a difficult challenge, especially at large scales, because quantum systems are incredibly delicate.

At D-Wave, our approach is quantum annealing, which harnesses the natural evolution of quantum states: we set up the problem at the beginning, we let quantum physics do its natural evolution, and the configuration at the end corresponds to the answer we are trying to find. This difference in complexity is the reason why we have been able to scale the number of quantum bits (qubits) in D-Wave systems to exceed 2000, far beyond the state of the art for gate-model quantum computing.

D-Wave has been developing various generations of our “machine of a different kind,” to use Feynman’s words, since 1999 and we are the world’s first commercial quantum computer company