BOTHELL, Wash. — IonQ’s quantum computer factory is still ramping up to full operation, but the company is already expanding its footprint by tens of thousands of square feet.
A year ago, when IonQ revealed its plans to create a new kind of research and manufacturing facility in the Seattle area, the idea was to use roughly 65,000 square feet of space on two floors of a three-story building in Bothell that once housed offices for AT&T Wireless.
“We’re happy to announce today we’ve taken the third floor, so we have the entire building now,” IonQ CEO Peter Chapman said during a ribbon-cutting ceremony. “So, a 50% increase in our footprint in one year. … Now we’re up to about 100,000 square feet in the building.”
IonQ considers its Bothell facility to be the first dedicated quantum computer manufacturing facility in the United States. The building will house the company’s research and development team — and also serve as IonQ’s second quantum data center, following in the footsteps of its Maryland HQ.
Chapman said it cost about $20 million to upgrade the building’s infrastructure for IonQ’s purposes.
“We now have, in the Seattle area, about 80 people at IonQ,” he said. “A year ago, we had something less than that — a handful. So, we’re growing quickly in the Seattle area. And I expect that in this next year, we will invest probably somewhere close to $80 million in the Seattle area, which will go to our promise of investing a billion dollars over the next 10 years.”
Today marked the factory’s official opening — attended by VIPs including Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., who chairs the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. But IonQ’s team started working at the Bothell facility weeks earlier.
In one of the building’s first-floor labs, a Forte Enterprise computer is being assembled for QuantumBasel, a Swiss tech hub. It’s about the size of a drive-through espresso stand, with the quantum processing unit enclosed inside what appears to be a glass box at its center.
In another lab, engineers are working on two custom-built quantum computers that will be delivered to the Air Force Research Laboratory under the terms of a $25.5 million deal. And on the far end of the lab, researchers are working on ways to reduce the size of the vacuum enclosures in which quantum chips are sealed.
In contrast to classical computing’s binary one-or-zero approach, quantum processors work with different types of bits (“qubits”) that can represent different values simultaneously until the results are read out. Certain types of problems, ranging from network optimization to codebreaking, are thought to be more easily solvable using quantum algorithms.
“Quantum computing has the potential to be a game-changer, helping us solve some of the biggest problems in the world,” Cantwell said. “To create new drugs to fight disease. To unlock new ways to produce and store energy. To develop fertilizer and improve food production.”
Such applications may still be in their infancy, but there are signs that the infant is growing up fast. Chapman pointed to the potential for quantum machine learning.
“Everything that we do with the customer shows that that’s going to be a huge hit,” Chapman told GeekWire in an interview. “Things like being able to do quantum machine learning on sparse data — we just can’t do that using classical hardware. You need to have a much stronger signal than the data, and if it’s sparse, it just can’t do it. We’ve shown huge improvements in terms of the size of the data that you need to be able to create the model.”
Some companies, including as Google, IBM and Microsoft, are developing quantum hardware that’s based on superconducting circuits. IonQ is taking a different technological approach that relies on the quantum properties of trapped ions. Its Forte Enterprise computers use ytterbium ions, but its next-generation Tempo computer will get an upgrade to barium ions supplied by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
Engineers at the Bothell facility will manufacture Forte Enterprise as well as Tempo computers — and researchers plan to lay the groundwork for a next-next-generation computer with even greater capability. IonQ measures processing power using a yardstick known as algorithmic qubits, or AQ. By that measure, the Forte Enterprise is capable of AQ35, the Tempo will bring that figure up to AQ64, and the yet-to-be-named, next-next-gen computer will target AQ256.
“I think we’re the only company who’s thinking about how the next generation needs to be half the cost of the previous generation,” Chapman said. “So, what this place is really about is getting to a point where we can use contract manufacturers to build subassemblies for us, and then we do final assembly downstairs. And these things are dirt-cheap — I mean, in relative terms.”
For years, IonQ has been partnering with three of the titans of cloud computing — Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud — and Chapman said his company selected Bothell as the site for its factory in part because of the strong presence those companies have in the Seattle area. “It’s always good when you’re close to your customers,” he said.
IonQ’s Bothell factory is also close to the University of Washington, which is sharpening its focus on quantum information science and engineering through a program known as QuantumX. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory — which is headquartered in Richland, Wash., and has a research center in Seattle — adds yet another regional angle to the quantum equation.
In her remarks, Cantwell pointed with pride to the Northwest’s tech connections.
“Our region is already known worldwide for our innovation and leadership, and this facility will continue to build on that,” she said. “We know that local software and cloud computing companies have changed the world. … So it should come as no surprise that we are becoming the ‘Quantum Valley,’ if you will, of the United States. Now, there may be a few regions that are going to fight us for that title, but we’re going to do everything we can to move forward on it.”
