Venture with Grace
00:40:59 · Juha Vartiainen, Grace Gong
[00:40:59] S1: a [00:40:59] S0: very popular industry today or very up and coming industry even compared to how popular AI is. Very important for the people who is in the cutting edge industry, but for the general public, people may not have enough knowledge. So I'm curious, what was the conversation kind of like to whether it's educate the VC market and then helping them see through this is a really important kind of category of things to invest in?
00:41:34 · Juha Vartiainen
[00:41:34] S1: That's a very good question. And the situation is changing all the time. So when we started talking to investors like eight, nine years ago, they were really smiling for us that what are you guys talking about quantum computing? What is that what it means? So we had to really educate the investors and tell them, give them a little bit the lessons from the basics of quantum technology and quantum computing. And that has actually changed a lot. So lately, I think many investors have heard about quantum computers. They have even invested on some quantum companies and they have their own experts in some bigger funds, or especially the funds who are... There are even funds who are focused on quantum investments. And then those ones who are not that familiar, they use some experts. And let's say, I think nowadays the quantum is, let's say, nowadays I don't need to anymore usually explain like what is the qubit and what is the quantum computing and how this whole thing is going to work. But let's say investors start to have the basic know how, maybe they have a little bit different view or we have to explain our business plan and why it makes sense, for example, to invest on on premise quantum computing and not only the cloud model and those kinds of things. Let's say we are talking very different things than a few years ago. Let's say investors have much better questions nowadays.
00:43:19 · Grace Gong
[00:43:19] S0: I wonder... So since we briefly talk about the quantum and the GPU space and data center in general, will quantum and GPU end up in the same data center? Or how does it actually physically work together?
00:43:37 · Juha Vartiainen
[00:43:37] S1: Yeah, there are a lot of ways how they can work together. And there are different modalities in quantum computing. So superconducting one is like 1,000 times faster than, let's say, usual atoms or ion traps. And that makes a big difference. So those guys with these other modalities can claim that the GPUs can help in quantum error correction, but the superconducting one is so fast that it doesn't work. But let's say there are those hybrid algorithms. So superconducting one is very good that you run one part of the algorithm with quantum computer, other part on, let's say, classical cluster, and you take those steps one after other. And very interesting things start to happen when you have a low latency. So you can connect the quantum computers to the supercomputers with low latency, let's say, in less than one millisecond. So you can start to have very interesting dynamics there. That's very promising technology. So collocating the quantum computers to the same data center together with supercomputers, GPUs, it's still a little bit like a research topic what exactly you can do, but we are going to see probably a lot of results in near future. So we have been integrating to more than 10 data centers already our systems, and there is a lot of investigations tests out there. A lot of these hybrid computations are probably starting to make some results soon. There was this thing like how AI can help in quantum, but there are also some very good ideas how the quantum can help the AI and supercomputing.
00:45:41 · Grace Gong
[00:45:41] S0: I love that. So when you're thinking about the next kind of like five years or so for your own plans in quantum, as well as how the quantum industry is going to kind of shift towards you, what does that kind of look like in the future?
00:46:00 · Juha Vartiainen
[00:46:00] S1: It's very difficult to predict in this rapid change, but I think what we see around us in Finland, there are like 140 data centers under construction. As I said, the power consumption of the whole country is going to grow like 40% in coming years. So I think that's a huge megatrend. The AI is going to get big. And I think Quantum is kind of a little cousin of AI in that sense that, let's say, it will have a growing number of useful applications and use cases. And let's say, this success of AI will leak to some part of the quantum. And I'm quite confident that the future of the quantum will be also very bright and growing. There's a lot to do in developing quantum computer to, let's say, do the fault tolerant era and developing all the technology that it needs. So that will be a long road. It doesn't necessarily happen immediately. But there are like now a lot of money behind it, a lot of, let's say, best minds working on it. And let's say, we start to see, let's say, some kind of consolidation also this field. So some companies getting IPO ed, getting bigger, growing and consolidating. There's some MMAs. So some companies growing and becoming winners, starting to deliver more and more. The quantum computer is becoming more powerful and then delivering to those growing numbers of data centers and, let's say, starting to bring the benefit of hybrid algorithms integrated to the HPC and AI. So I see there like a continuum of development, which is very, very kind of suitable for Quantum.