Intel’s quest to build the world’s first true quantum computer

A person holding up a chip

Intel’s James Clarke with a 17-qubit superconducting quantum chip

Shawn Morgan/Intel Corporation

Intel is taking a slow and steady approach to quantum computing. Competitors like Google may be racing to achieve so-called quantum supremacy, in which a quantum computer outperforms an ordinary one. But Intel’s James Clarke has bigger ideas. He leads the firm’s quantum computing research team, and says it is looking past near-term goals in order to be the first to make a device with a million qubits, or quantum bits – enough to have a real impact on the world.

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