Sundar Pichai and Daniel Sank, right, with one of Google's Quantum Computers in the Santa Barbara lab, in California.
It’s a domain we don’t often think of, even if we all rely on services that originate from it. And in this domain, a crisis is coming. The growth of what the industry calls “compute” – another way of describing the processing power of the data centres – is unsustainable as it demands increasingly vast amounts of energy and resources and exacerbates environmental challenges.
A quantum computer is a computer that can perform certain important problems exponentially faster than normal computers by leveraging the properties of quantum physics. Small quantum computers exist today, but none exist at the scale of a data centre . It is only these data-centre-sized quantum computers that will be able to solve problems such as developing novel catalysts for the synthesis of synthetic hydrocarbons, new carbon capture and sequestration solutions, discovering new materials to create next-generation batteries.