Honeywell’s quantum computer is now commercially available after it was first announced in March. The company, best known in the US for making thermostats, says enterprise customers can access the machine either directly through one of its own interfaces or via Microsoft’s Azure Quantum portal. As it did when it unveiled the device, Honeywell claims it’s the world’s most powerful quantum computer. 

Typically, when most companies talk about quantum computers, they usually mention qubits. Honeywell is instead using a metric called quantum volume to play up the capabilities of its machine. The term tries to capture the “quality” of qubits. The larger the quantum volume value, the more complex problems the computer can solve. Honeywell says its computer features a quantum volume of 64. For context, IBM recently said its latest quantum computer had a quantum volume of 32.

Instead of building its own quantum computer (which involves a lot of dollar), AWS has launched Braket (so named for the common notation of quantum states) in partnership with D-Wave, IonQ and Rigetti. The service makes these companies’ quantum computers available through the cloud, allowing developers and researchers to play around with qubits and quantum circuits, and to test quantum algorithms in a simulated environment. Users can build their own algorithms from scratch, or work with a set of pre-built ones. Everything is accessed through a single interface.

AWS is also launching the AWS Center for Quantum Computing and the AWS Quantum Solutions Lab. Again, neither involve Amazon building its own quantum computer, but rather they create an ecosystem for the advancement and exploration of the technology. It’s a smart move for Amazon — it gets them in the quantum game without the eye-watering financial risk, and opens up the tech to those that couldn’t otherwise ever hope to access it. Microsoft launched a similar service — Azure Quantum — last month, while IBM’s Q Experience is already well established, so it seems that achieving quantum supremacy might not be tech’s main objective after all.

It’s difficult to simulate quantum physics, as the computing demand grows exponentially the more complex the quantum system gets — even a supercomputer might not be enough. AI might come to the rescue, though. Researchers have developed a computational method that uses neural networks to simulate quantum systems of “considerable” size, no matter what the geometry. To put it relatively simply, the team combines familiar methods of studying quantum systems (such as Monte Carlo random sampling) with a neural network that can simultaneously represent many quantum states.