More than 80% of large companies in Britain are scaling up their quantum computing capabilities. According to research by Accenture, this is to make the country a leader in deploying the nascent technology to solve complex problems.
In the past couple of years, the technology has started to move from the research realm to commercial applications. Because businesses seek to harness the potential exponential increase in computing power it offers. Google said in late-2019 that, it had used a quantum computer to solve in minutes a complex problem that would take supercomputers thousands of years to crack. Rivals including IBM Corp and Microsoft Corp are also developing the technology in their cloud businesses.
Rather than storing information in bits, zeros or ones, quantum computing makes use of a property of sub-atomic particles. By this they can exist simultaneously in different states. They can then become entangled, i.e., they can influence each other’s behavior in an observable way. And that leads to exponential increases in computing power. Britain has long been a leader in fundamental research in science and technology. Maynard Williams, a managing director for Accenture Technology in the UK & Ireland, said that the COVID had forced companies to adopt new technology faster and had increased their willingness to innovate. Accenture’s research showed British businesses were making a head start in experimenting with quantum computing.
According to research, Britain was outpacing the global average of 62% of large firms scaling quantum technology. It was leading the United States, where the figure was 74%. Majority of the companies expanding quantum computing in Britain. They said that they would increase investment in the technology in the next three years. Accenture did not quantify the scaling up or the investment plans. Williams said that it is an exciting moment of focus around what these new technologies can do. While the technology is still being tested to create new products and services, they expect quantum computing to bring huge advances in computing power and solve business problems that are too complex for classical computing systems.
