ZuriQ: Shaping the Future of Penning Ion Trap Quantum Computers

Quantum computing promises to solve complex problems beyond the reach of classical computers, with trapped ions being a leading candidate for robust and high-fidelity qubits. 

While quantum computers with a few trapped ions have already been demonstrated to work amazingly well, the challenge remains to demonstrate the same for quantum computers with orders of magnitude more qubits. 

ZuriQ pioneers a new approach to trapping ions, aiming to arrange tens of thousands in a three-dimensional array and use them as high-quality qubits to show utility in solving commercial problems. The spinout from ETH Zurich was founded by Pavel Hrmo, Tobias Sägesser and Shreyans Jain in the spring of 2024 and is now part of the QAI Ventures accelerator’s cohort II.

Future of Computing News

⚛️ EU Launches Cryogenic Quantum Project (InsideHPC)

⚛️ Universal Quantum achieves research breakthrough in advanced error-correction using high-fidelity long-range qubit connectivity (Universal Quantum)

🧠 How the human brain is inspiring energy-efficient AI: University of Sydney researchers are developing an AI method to reduce the energy required by data centres (Sydney)

🤖 Grok-2 Beta Release: Grok-2 is a frontier language model with state-of-the-art reasoning capabilities (xAI)

🤖 AI PCs made up 14% of quarterly personal computer shipments, Canalys says (Reuters)

🤖 Scientists hope to accelerate the development of human-level AI using a network of powerful supercomputers (LiveScience)

🦾 SoftBank's Intel AI processor plans in doubt as insiders say it is now considering a TSMC partnership (Tom’s Hardware)

🦾 Huawei Readies New Chip to Challenge Nvidia, Surmounting U.S. Sanctions (WSJ)

🦾 Novel Ideas to Cool Data Centers: Liquid in Pipes or a Dunking Bath (WSJ)

🔬 Accelerating Innovation in Academia: Submit your research proposal to the NVIDIA Academic Grant Program (Nvidia)

Funding News

⚛️ Quantum Circuits Secures More Than $60 Million in Series B to commercialize its quantum systems with built-in error detection (The Quantum Insider)

🦾 RISC-V startup Akeana raises $100m; exits stealth mode and launches processor and IP portfolios (DCD)

🦾 Thintronics has secured an undisclosed Series A Extension to advance high-performance insulators for next-gen electronics (R&D World)

🦾 Strategic round puts chiplet interconnect pioneer Eliyan over $100M in investment raised to date (Design & Reuse)

🤖 Felicis Ventures leads $10 million round in AI startup MemGPT, a toolkit for developing AI agents (Business Insider)

🤖 AI-Focused VC Radical Ventures Nears $800 Million Fundraise, backed by Fei-Fei Li, Geoffrey Hinton, and Canada pensions (Bloomberg)

🤖🔐 Anjuna Raised $25 Million To Keep Data Safe While Training AI (Forbes)

Good Reads

Transformer Explained (GitHub)

“Transformer Explainer features a live GPT-2 (small) model running directly in the browser. This model is derived from the PyTorch implementation of GPT by Andrej Karpathy's nanoGPT project and has been converted to ONNX Runtime for seamless in-browser execution.”

How Base 3 Computing Beats Binary (Quanta Magazine)

“In addition to its numerical efficiency, base 3 offers computational advantages. It suggests a way to reduce the number of queries needed to answer questions with more than two possible answers.”

Quantum Sensing With a Special Synthetic Diamond (YouTube)

Asianometry just featured Quantum Diamonds, using diamond-built quantum sensors to improve yields for semiconductor fabs.

We’ve also interviewed them previously: Shaping the Future of Diamond-Based Quantum Sensors

Inside the Snowflake-Databricks Rivalry, and Why Both Fear Microsoft (Bloomberg)

“Within Databricks, ‘coopetition’ is a becoming a more common way to refer to the relationship with Microsoft. The two have long had close ties — a massive chunk of Databricks business comes from customers using Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure owing to a highly successful joint service sold through its Azure cloud services.”

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