Customers

Nu Quantum will partner with QPU companies to sell networked systems to the customers of quantum computing. In the long term, our customers will be Hyperscalers and Cloud Companies who will host Quantum Computing services, and End Users who will establish on-prem Quantum Computing facilities for exclusive use. Nu Quantum has launched a consortium called the Commercial Quantum Datacenter Alliance to build the commercial ecosystem and value chain around us. From this Alliance, we can seed commercial opportunities as well as thought leadership in the market.In the short term, we will sell systems to national Governments around the world who have pledged over $50BN to quantum over the next decade.

As described in our Go-to-Market, in some cases QPU partners will also be our customers - e.g. when they are large primes (IBM, AWS), and/or when these companies act as the Prime in a contract, where Nu Quantum supplies networking technology.

Commercial Quantum Datacentre Alliance

Purpose

‍The purpose of the Alliance is to ‘capture requirements’ for future generations of our QNU technology, to be commercially desirable for each party (appreciating that their requirements will be mostly divergent):

How it can be best integrated with current Datacenter infrastructure
How it can be adapted to network three different kinds of qubits: trapped ions, neutral atoms and superconducting

The not-so covert purpose of the group is to educate and influence about Nu Quantum’s roadmap and ambitions and begin relations that could result in commercial sales to CRC.

Several members of CRC could also be potential acquirers of NuQ.

Status Q424

CISCO: We have had strong engagement with SVPs responsible for Research and Quantum Research specifically. Cisco are exploring make vs. buy routes to Quantum Networking; they appear to be focussed on the QC use-case over previous strategies looking at QKD.

CRC Members*: In addition to Cisco, these companies have agreed to participate in the project and have already enganged in least one in-person workshop on the requirements space:

Airbus : As leading QC End-User
nVidia : Leading GPU / Compute / AI provider into Datacenters
nttData : Leading Data Center operator
OQC : Leading Superconducting modality QC
Quantinuum : Leading Trapped Ion modality QC
QuEra : Leading Cold Atom modality QC

This constellation is a strong start and - with the 3 leading QC modalities represented - it can glean some genuinely useful insight into the future functional, non-functional and performance requirements of datacenter-ready Quantum Networking. QPhox, a company working on transduction technology, has also recently agreed to participate and will join our next cohort of activites.

*Note that under current arrangement, except Cisco, the Nu Quantum cannot publicly name the members of the CRC explicitly (we don’t have their collective permission).

Evolution

Nu Quantum have ambition to grow a more significant and publicly visible entity from the seeds of the CRC.

Expansion: Invite additional members to build a broad and significant SIG or Alliance around Quantum Networking. Add representatives of additional modalities; add more more members per modality. It may be helpful to bring in selected vendors who service some fraction of the stack (overlap with Nu Quantum) to give some neutrality / vendor agnosticism to the consortia - so it does not appear as just a vehicle for Nu Quantum’s self-promotion.

Scope / Charter: Promote awareness of value and significance of networking (to compute use-case specifically); promote standardised Terminology and quality metrics; Explore standardisation routes (for control, signalling, benchmarking);

Timing: Lobby existing CRC members to announce the consortia in Q424 May be timed with a re-brand with a stronger and more relevant message. TBC 1H25 - recruit additional members, Facilitate some public workshop - tied to significant industry event.

Partnerships with Qubit Companies

Nu Quantum has ongoing partnerships with 5 QPU companies today.

Partnerships as part of CQD Alliance

Quantinuum
QuEra
OQC

Hardware development partnerships

Infleqtion: see the press release about our QPU-QPI integration work [validation of Nu Quantum's QPI cavity locking technology]

AQT: integrating our QPI with their QPU vacuum system technology under the scope of project IDRA

Overview

Nu Quantum’s ‘Entanglement Fabric’ network architecture efficiently transforms physical qubits distributed across many nodes (or ‘cores’) into logical qubits available for computation. The architecture is adaptable to different modalities, with initial support for those that natively emit optical photons - Ions and Atoms. Support for other modalities - e.g. superconducting) - requires additional technology e.g. ‘transduction’

A system built around Nu Quantum’s architecture will require hundreds to thousands of QC nodes - each with <50 qubits and at least 1 ‘QPI’ interface for connection to system. A robust model predicts the performance of an overall system of N nodes with M qubits per node and F local entanglement fidelity.As availability of high quality qubits at large scale is essential, the relations with qubit-suppliers needs careful navigation.

Commercial Models

A large and useful QC built using Nu Quantum’s architecture will require large number of nodes each with a relatively small number of high quality (fidelity) qubits. Fundamentally there are ~4 engagement models possible:(Offering to qubit vendor In Italics)

Nu Quantum as Prime (NuQ Prime)
Nu Quantum offers up service of Logical Qubits (could be extended to full QC service), and sources and supplies qubits under subcontract / partnership with a qubit vendor.
Nu Quantum technically and commercially provides and maintains qubit-pool to services the needs of the architecture.
‍Offer: volume; access to market; focus (does not require ‘full stack’)
Peer-Partnership (P-P)
Nu Quantum partners-as-peer with qubit provider to jointly offer service to customer (who likely is a System Integrator - SI).
Contract apportions revenue between NuQ and Qubit company. SI offers service from combined technologies.
‍Offer: volume; access to market; focus (does not require ‘full stack’), visibility
Nu Quantum provides product sub-systems (System Sale)
Nu Quantum sells system-level capability. E.g. QNU with network orchestration.
‍Offer: time-to-market; differentiation; focus
Nu Quantum provides components / licences (Comp. Sale)
Nu Quantum sells / licences e.g. QPI, Entanglement Scheme; Dist-QEC scheme
‍Offer: time-to-market; differentiation; focus

Challenges

Nu Quantum’s architecture occupies a significant part of the QC stack (from photons-out-of-QPU to Logical Qubits). It’s impossible to ignore the fact that qubits - while completely essential and fundamental to the overall system - are abstracted by the architecture and that the Nu Quantum piece is higher up and ‘closer to the end-users’ (and thus closer to the money)

For qubit vendors who have, or aspire to, ‘Full Stack QC’ position, the NuQ network ‘gets in the way’. Some players will recognise the patterns from classical computing and networking (and in fact most technology) where being higher in the stack is fundamentally a better and stronger position and being lower down (once standards emerge) is sometime weaker and prone to commoditisation.

The volume and density of QC nodes for a valuable system is very high; there are challenges on the qubit provider’s capabilities to ramp to the volume required and also on the whole supply-chain behind them

Strategy

Nu Quantum has a strong play to occupy a valuable piece of the emerging QC stack. To ultimately deliver high-value systems it needs to carefully manage the relationships with the vendors able deliver the quality and volume of qubit nodes required. Strategies include:

Maintain friendly and transparent relations with multiple vendors per-modality: Evolution of CRC into CQDA provides vehicle for this. We will establish the appetite and ability of each partner to integrate at various points in the stack: how strategic is offering full-stack service ? What do they regard as core IP and what would they rather find a 3rd party solution for ?
Be agile with commercial offerings and adjust to suit opportunities. For large national opportunities, the 'Peer-to-Peer' Commercial Model described above may fit best. For others, and if a suitable partner is found, then the'NuQ Prime' model may be cleaner contractually.
Seek Proof-of-Concept integrations by having at least 1 path to a strong PoC QPI compatible with each qubit modality. We prioritise QPI development for ions and then atoms in this order, due to the high quality of the qubits as well as urgency-of-need-to-scale for each. Having quantified metrics for QPI performance (i.e. collection efficiency) with proof that integration does not affect qubit quality is important.

End-users, cloud companies, and hyperscalers

At the top of the value-chain are end-users that will access a FT-QC to solve valuable problems beyond the reach of classical computers.

End-users can be segmented by some combination the class(es) of problems they require to solve (’use-cases’ - e.g. Chemistry; Logistics etc.) or their own Industry (Automotive; Aerospace; Financial Services etc.) . Some Industry sectors are acknowledged to have interest in multiple use-cases - e.g. ‘Aerospace’ vertical has interest across materials, chemistry, logistics etc.

Access Models : ‘QC-aaS’ vs. ‘On Prem. QC’

End-users will access QC (primarily) by some combination of:

Access to a Public Service (analogous to classical Cloud compute service) and / or
Access to Private ‘owned’ Service (analogous to ‘On-Prem’ classical compute service)

Service models

Ultimately (10~15 years) it’s likely that QC may settle into a similar pattern to current classical cloud and HPC compute:The majority of users will use shared & hosted services (with hosts being the same companies that dominate Cloud service - Google, AWS, IBM etc. )A minority of users with special security or very specific application needs may ‘own’ and host their own QC (analogous to national Governments today owning their own large HPC / supercomputer for specific application (e.g. meteorological) or for sensitive (’national security’) workloads.)

Hyperscalers and Datacentre Providers

QC Services Today

The major Cloud vendors (AWS, Google, IBM) all have existing pay-as-you go QC-aaS offerings. AWS host multiple and competing QC services today via Amazon Braket.All of the services on all of the platforms are somewhat experimental (uptime / reliability is orders of magnitude behind the classical services) and none of the available QCs yet offer any service that’s commercially ‘useful’. They do have utility for providing programming experience and familiarisation.

Market, Classical comparisons

With the promise of extremely high utility and attractiveness across multiple rich vertical markets, being able to deliver Fault Tolerant QC services with 50 to 1000’s of logical qubits is compelling to all the existing providers. In the ~20 years since first availability, classical Cloud compute has seen huge improvements in performance, functionality availability and security, with aggressive competition driving down prices. The result has been the ubiquitous reliance on Cloud for even the most conservative markets (e,g, Banking and Finance), the decline of the private Datacenter, the move of IT from Capex to Opex and the creation of huge value for the providers -e.g, AWS alone has annual revenue run-rate in excess of $100bn.

Predictions

To capture and maintain premium accounts all the leading CSPs will seek to have a QC-offering alongside classical compute - QC service offers differentiation in a highly competitive market. Existing fledgling QC services will be expanded, and Nu Quantum’s offering will be highly attractive to CSPs on the promises of: Scalability; Abstraction; Efficiency.

Why Nu Quantum?

Nu Quantum’s technology and business-plan supports both service ‘-aaS’ and On Prem models: the ‘Entanglement Fabric’ delivered in product form has the same high value in either scenario. To an existing or new-entrant provider of a public service (’QC-aaS’) the NuQ ‘Fabric’ offers a route to scalable service with advantage of some commoditisation of the qubits (allowing a competitive market and potentially dual-source supply chain). To a ‘private’ on-prem customer (typically - a national government) the same abstraction is attractive and potentially allows the system contract to prefer or specify a country-local qubit provider.

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Governments

National Governments and supra-National entities (e.g. the EU) are a clear target for initial networking test-beds, Intermediate-scale Distributed QCs, and future product based, upgradeable QC systems (with a path to Fault Tolerant scale).

They are attractive as they have both large budgets and strong motivations: Positive (early access to societal benefits of QC) and Negative (fear of competitive and national-security risks from states that do gain early access). Quantum Computing has relatively clear and measurable performance metrics so there is also access to competition between states - ‘national pride’.

Governments will be customers of both our quantum networking testbed products, and our Fault Tolerant Quantum Computer Network product.

Who?

Our target market are governments with a committed budget to quantum, and those who have already purchased a QPU (because this indicates an appetite to procure Quantum R&D systems). See table below for reference.

What?

A quantum networking testbed enables governments to better understand and use distant entanglement, which will underpin quantum computing at scale, secure quantum communication networks and advanced sensing.