DWave System’s main quantum computing revenue will software licensing and a cloud model

D-Wave is known for building hardware, it is in software development that part of the company’s future revenue lies, both in licensing software and with an eventual objective of building a cloud model, which Dwave president Bo Ewald says hold 50% margins for the business.

While the market for who can own D-Wave’s computer is limited by the physical limitations of running the machine, Google has just renewed their agreement with D-Wave for the next seven years.

Last month, D-Wave updated the Google computer, located at the NASA Ames Research Center, upgrading it from 512 qubits to over 1,000.

President Bo Ewald estimates that D-Wave is now where the supercomputer was in 1980, or where IBM was in 1955.

Founded in 1999, D-Wave has been granted over 125 U.S. patents and has published over 80 articles in scientific journals and has raised $175 million to date.

While the D-Wave 2X’s processor is itself only thumbnail sized, the computer’s housing takes up a 10′ x 7′ x 10′ footprint, mainly comprised of a cryogenic refrigeration system.
Furthermore, the computer must operate in an extremely isolated environment, free from interference from magnetic fields, vibration, or any external RF signals.

Ewald tells the story of meeting with the head of a large German technology company and several of his company’s employees in attendance, who said at the end, “This is the meeting we will tell our grandchildren about. This is the meeting where we decided to get into quantum computing.”

The company’s technology covers a wide variety of applications, including minimizing error in voice recognition, controlling risk in a financial portfolio, or reducing loss in an energy grid.

Asked by an audience member about the difference between D-Wave’s computer and IBM’s effort at quantum computing, Ewald responds, “Without wanting to be a smart alec about it, ours works,” at which point he goes into painstaking technical detail regarding how the machine does what it does.

Geordie Rose, Founder of D-Wave (recent clients are Google and NASA) believes that the power of quantum computing is that we can `exploit parallel universes’ to solve problems that we have no other means of confirming. Simply put, quantum computers can think exponentially faster and simultaneously such that as they mature they will out pace us.

SOURCES – Youtube, Cantech letter