Leading Japanese QC Firms/Government Band Together to Propel QC Systems’ Competitive Prospects

Ten leading German corporations recently stood up the Quantum Technology and Applications Consortium (QUTAC) to explore and promote the commercial application of quantum computing (QC) targeted for the German industrial base as a way to ensure German competitive advantage across a broad array of industries. The effort spans industrial sectors and founding members that include automotive manufacturing (Bosch, BMW, and Volkswagen), chemical and pharmaceutical (BASF, Boehringer Ingelheim, and Merck), insurance (Munich Re) and technology (Infineon, SAP, and Siemens). AIRBUS is participating as an external contributor.

Using biological building blocks in place of traditional materials to assemble computers has been a research topic for many years, but recently the first potential commercial use cases have begun to emerge, centered on storage for large data sets. The DNA Storage Alliance, created to promote a storage ecosystem based on synthesized DNA strands, recently shared their aspirations for the emerging technology that offers significant promise in durability, simplicity, cost, and density over traditional magnetic counterparts. The initial goals of the alliance are to educate the public and raise awareness about DNA-based storage. Further out, the alliance may pursue the creation of specifications and standards, such as encoding, physical interfaces, retention, and file systems, to ensure that DNA-based solutions complement existing storage hierarchies. The alliance notes that expectations for the growth rate of current storage mechanisms cannot keep pace with the rising demand for data storage, particularly where growing data retention and related data mining efforts are driving the need to save increasingly larger data sets for longer periods of time. Such requirements are well suited to DNA-based archive storage characteristics in applications including digital content creation, robotics, smart cities, autonomous vehicles, healthcare, astronomy, and climate science.