D-Wave sells its first quantum computer

By Hamish Johnston

I’ve just received a press release from Canada’s D-Wave Systems saying that the firm has sold its first quantum computer.

The buyer is the US-based defence and security contractor Lockheed Martin and the company will use the system to address some of its “most challenging computation problems”, according to D-Wave. “The multi-year contract includes a system, maintenance and associated professional services,” says the company.

You may recall that earlier this month D-Wave scientists published a paper in Nature that showed that certain aspects of the firm’s “quantum annealing” scheme for quantum computation worked as predicted.

D-Wave was founded in 1999 and for many years the efficacy of the firm’s technology was a matter of much debate in the physics community.

Now it seems that things are looking up for the Vancouver-based firm.