IonQ Plans to Establish First Dedicated US-based QC Manufacturing Facility

Two weeks ago, the US Department of Defense officially canceled its Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud solicitation and contract, ending a long period of uncertainty and controversy. Originally, the contract, which designated $10 billion to support cloud computing capabilities for a variety of workloads and departments across the DoD, had been awarded to a single vendor, Microsoft Azure, in 2019. However, after appeals from other vendors, the process was reevaluated. Ultimately Microsoft was awarded the contract a second time. After nearly two years into the JEDI solicitation and award process, the DoD stated that their needs had evolved, and the original contract no longer aligned with the requirements of the department. A new solicitation was issued, the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract, which indicated a plan to use multiple vendors to fulfill the needs of the contract. Currently, the DoD is seeking proposals from Microsoft and Amazon Web Services but will likely evaluate other qualified U.S. based CSPs.

Survey respondents cited GPUs as the most anticipated processing element within the next 12-18 months at a rate of 74%. When asked about which processing elements they expect to be incorporated into their HPC/AI/HPDA computing resources, the majority of respondents across all sectors expected GPUs to be first (74.0%) and TPUs (24.3%) as next most anticipated. Government and academia respondents reported the highest expectation at a rate of 84%. This data is from the eighth annual study of Hyperion Research's high-performance computing (HPC) end-user-based tracking of the HPC marketplace. It included 181 HPC end-user sites with 3,830 HPC systems.