Riverlane, the global leader in quantum error correction technology, is pleased to announce its acceptance into the Quantum Energy Initiative, a global community of quantum technology companies and research organisations committed to better understanding the physical resource cost of quantum technologies.

With quantum computers expected to solve specific problems much more efficiently than classical supercomputers, there’s growing hope that their integration with supercomputers in data centres could lead to significant energy savings and lower the amount of carbon emissions produced.  

Early breakthrough research led by Google (with NASA and Oak Ridge National Labs) hinted that existing prototype quantum computers could already exhibit reduced energy consumption. However, it is now generally agreed that carefully chosen metrics of energy consumption are required to allow a fair comparison of quantum and classical computing. At the same time, if quantum computers are to do better than classical computers, then every major hardware and software component of that quantum computer must be as energy efficient as possible.

Riverlane has joined the Quantum Energy Initiative (QEI), a community focused on researching the environmental footprint of quantum computing, to help with this effort. Alongside existing members of the QEI including Microsoft Azure Quantum, IBM Quantum and Alice & Bob, Riverlane aims to contribute to a number of goals including defining energy-based metrics for quantum technologies; deriving fundamental bounds for energy consumption; using energetic efficiencies as optimisation tools; and understanding the impact of hardware and software on energy consumption.  

While research into these areas is still in its infancy, the Quantum Energy Initiative recommends that companies make conscious design choices during this current phase of quantum computing development to help pave the way towards energy-efficient quantum computing.  

“We are excited to be a supporting member of the Quantum Energy Initiative’ said Marco Ghibauldi, VP of Engineering at Riverlane. “For quantum computers to deliver energy savings over today’s classical supercomputers, we first need them to be useful. This is our main priority at Riverlane, through our specialist focus on our quantum error correction, but we recognise there’s even more we can do at this stage. By joining the Quantum Energy Initiative, we hope to contribute to this exciting new field of research and continue to build our understanding of how our QEC Stack can be developed and integrated to maximise energy efficiencies across the whole quantum computing stack.”