Future of Computing Conference 2024

Big news this week: we're bringing the Future of Computing Conference 2024 to Munich 🥳

After the first edition last year in Berlin, we'll gather this year 250+ startup founders, deep tech investors, and computing geeks for this one-day conference

Here's what to expect:

👉 30 pitches from computing startups from all over Europe
👉 keynotes and insights from major ecosystem players
👉 high concentration of silicon experts and high-quality networking

From quantum computing and AI chips all the way to novel semiconductor materials and chip interconnects – this is your chance to connect with the players shaping the future of computing

I'm super excited to organize this year's edition with Oliver Hasse from INAM - Innovation Network for Advanced Materials and Christopher Trummer and Tobias Wölfel from TUM Venture Labs

Learn more on the event’s website and secure your ticket – spots are limited:

Future of Computing News

🤖 Moving on from Amazon Alexa: Project Metis is Amazon’s ambitious response to ChatGPT (Dataconomy)

🤖 The AI consolidation is progressing: Nvidia’s rivals AMD to acquire Europe’s largest private AI lab Silo AI for €613.7M (SiliconCanals)

🧠 Under review by the UK government: SoftBank offers £400 million for AI startup Graphcore, says report (EENews)

🦾 New fabless semiconductor facilities in two Indian cities: Chip company Tessolve launches startup iVP Semi; raises $5m to build fabless facilities in India (DCD)

⚡️ New Fiber Optics Tech Smashes Data Rate Record: Expanded bandwidth yields a transmission rate of 402 terabits per second (IEEE Spectrum)

⚛️ Great move to strengthen access to end users: Kipu Quantum acquires the quantum computing platform PlanQK developed by Anaqor AG (Anaqor)

⚛️ 10-qubit QSea: German-made quantum computing demonstrator goes live in Hamburg (DCD)

Funding News

⚛️ Munich-based Planqc secures €50 million aiming to accelerate quantum computing innovation (EU Startups)

🤖 Defense AI startup Helsing raises $487M Series C (TechCrunch)

🤖 Skild AI Raises $300M Series A To Build A Scalable AI Foundation Model For Robotics (Yahoo! Finance)

🤖 AI Startup Hebbia Raises $130 Million to Help Firms Field Complex Queries (Bloomberg)

Deep Dive: Oxford Ionics’ Record Quantum Performance

This week, Oxford Ionics reported an industry record with their ion trap quantum chips, achieving 99.97% fidelity for quantum operations involving two qubits (check out their press release and the original arXiv paper).

If you’re familiar with machine learning, think of fidelity as vector similarity but for quantum states.

It measures how close a quantum state produced by a quantum operation in an actual physical quantum computer is to an ideal target quantum state as demanded by an abstract quantum algorithm.

So, a fidelity of 99.97% means they can implement quantum states pretty faithfully. The higher the fidelity, the lower the error rate, and generally, the more computational power a quantum computer can have. Another important ingredient will be scaling the number of qubits.

Oxford Ionics has demonstrated record fidelity for a quantum chip using an ion trap that can control up to 10 qubits. Their ambitious plan is to build a 256-qubit chip next.

Controlling this many qubits and maintaining a very high fidelity won’t be straightforward, but that’s the challenge that must be overcome to build powerful quantum computers that will eventually solve important problems and deliver business value.

If you liked this deep dive, please show it some love on LinkedIn or X (formerly Twitter).

And, check out our previous interview with Oxford Ionics: Shaping the Future of High-Performance Quantum Computing

Good Reads

🤖 ICCAD Contest on LLM-Assisted Hardware Code Generation (Nvlabs Github)

New challenge launched by Nvidia Labs: “The LLM4HWDesign contest aims to harness community efforts to develop an open-source, large-scale, and high-quality dataset for hardware code generation, igniting an ImageNet-like revolution in LLM-based hardware code generation.”

🤖 The Tragedies of Reality Are Coming for You (Sorta Insightful)

“I’ve noticed (with some schadenfreude) that LLM practitioners keep discovering pain points that robotics has hit before. We can’t reproduce these training runs because it’s too capital-intensive. Yeah, this has been a discussion point in robotics for at least a decade.”

🧠 Etched: Silicon Valley's Speedrun (Chipstrat)

“Notice something about Etched—the size of their fundraising suggests they are skipping stages and jumping from the Concept Validation stage to the Commercial Scaling stage.”

🦾 Our Vision Is to Get into Every Cellphone on the Planet (Reason Why Berlin)

“Berlin startup anabrid is turning heads with its unique approach to analog computing. We met with Sven Köppel, a quantum physicist and the company’s CSO, to discuss what it is all about.”

Also, check out our interview with Anabrid: Shaping the Future of Analog Computing

🦾 Here’s how Qualcomm’s new laptop chips really stack up to Apple, Intel, and AMD (The Verge)

“This is the fiercest Microsoft has been able to compete with MacBooks in price, performance, and battery life, and while Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips don’t outright beat Apple’s M3 chip …, they could make Intel and AMD scramble to catch up to another competitor — this time, on their home turf.”

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