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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| D-Wave Systems | 1/3 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Wave_Systems | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T11:06:52.071639+00:00 | kb-cron |
D-Wave Quantum Inc. is a quantum computing company with locations in Palo Alto, California and Burnaby, British Columbia. D-Wave claims to be the world's first company to sell computers that exploit quantum effects in their operation. D-Wave's early customers include Lockheed Martin, the University of Southern California, Google/NASA, and Los Alamos National Laboratory. D-Wave does not implement a generic, universal quantum computer; instead, their computers implement specialized quantum annealing.
== History == D-Wave was founded by Haig Farris, Geordie Rose, Bob Wiens, and Alexandre Zagoskin in 1999. Farris taught a business course at the University of British Columbia (UBC), where Rose obtained his PhD, and Zagoskin was a postdoctoral fellow. The company name refers to their first qubit designs, which used d-wave superconductors. D-Wave operated from various locations in Vancouver, British Columbia, and laboratory spaces at UBC before moving to its current location in the neighboring suburb of Burnaby. D-Wave also has offices in Palo Alto, California and Vienna, California, USA. D-Wave operated as an offshoot from UBC, while maintaining ties with the Department of Physics and Astronomy. It funded academic research in quantum computing, thus building a collaborative network of research scientists. The company collaborated with several universities and institutions, including UBC, IPHT Jena, Université de Sherbrooke, University of Toronto, University of Twente, Chalmers University of Technology, University of Erlangen, and Jet Propulsion Laboratory. These partnerships were listed on D-Wave's website until 2005. In June 2014, D-Wave announced a new quantum applications ecosystem with computational finance firm 1QB Information Technologies (1QBit) and cancer research group DNA-SEQ to focus on solving real-world problems with quantum hardware. On May 11, 2011, D-Wave announced D-Wave One, described as "the world's first commercially available quantum computer", operating on a 128-qubit chipset using quantum annealing (a general method for finding the global minimum of a function by a process using quantum fluctuations) to solve optimization problems. The D-Wave One was built on early prototypes such as D-Wave's Orion Quantum Computer. The prototype was a 16-qubit quantum annealing processor, demonstrated on February 13, 2007, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. D-Wave demonstrated what they claimed to be a 28-qubit quantum annealing processor on November 12, 2007. The chip was fabricated at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Microdevices Lab in Pasadena, California. In May 2013, a collaboration between NASA, Google, and the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) launched a Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab based on the D-Wave Two 512-qubit quantum computer that would be used for research into machine learning, among other fields of study. On February 17, 2014, D-Wave was featured on the cover of Time magazine. In the accompanying article, Lev Grossman describes D-Wave's approach to quantum computing, the potential of the technology, and the enthusiasm of investors like Jeff Bezos, while acknowledging skepticism from some critics. On August 20, 2015, D-Wave announced the general availability of the D-Wave 2X system, a 1000-qubit+ quantum computer. This was followed by an announcement on September 28, 2015, that it had been installed at the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab at NASA Ames Research Center. In January 2017, D-Wave released the D-Wave 2000Q, and an open-source repository containing software tools for quantum annealers. It contains Qbsolv, which is open-source software that solves quadratic unconstrained binary optimization problems on both the company's quantum processors and classic hardware architectures. In 2018, D-Wave released the Leap quantum cloud service. In 2025, D-Wave announced the sale of an Advantage system to Forschungszentrum Jülich, a research center in Germany. The system is installed at Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) at Forschungszentrum Jülich. Scientists at JSC, working with collaborators from other institutions, published in Nature the results of research conducted on the Advantage system simulating the dynamics of false vacuum decay. This work demonstrates that quantum computers can be used to explore complex cosmological phenomena. Also in 2025, D-Wave published a paper in the journal Science describing a computational simulation of a magnetic material that was performed on a quantum computer dramatically faster than performing such a simulation on a traditional computer. However, some physicists questioned these claims.
== Computer systems ==
The first commercially produced D-Wave processor was a programmable, superconducting integrated circuit with up to 128 pair-wise coupled superconducting flux qubits. The 128-qubit processor was superseded by a 512-qubit processor in 2013. The processor is designed to implement a special-purpose quantum annealing as opposed to being operated as a universal gate-model quantum computer. The underlying ideas for the D-Wave approach arose from experimental results in condensed matter physics, and particular work on quantum annealing in magnets performed by Gabriel Aeppli, Thomas Felix Rosenbaum, and collaborators, who had been checking the advantages, proposed by Bikas K. Chakrabarti & collaborators, of quantum tunneling/fluctuations in the search for ground state(s) in spin glasses. These ideas were later recast in the language of quantum computation by MIT physicists Edward Farhi, Seth Lloyd, Terry Orlando, and Bill Kaminsky, whose publications in 2000 and 2004 provided both a theoretical model for quantum computation that fit with the earlier work in quantum magnetism (specifically the adiabatic quantum computing model and quantum annealing, its finite temperature variant), and a specific enablement of that idea using superconducting flux qubits which is a close cousin to the designs D-Wave produced. To understand the origins of much of the controversy around the D-Wave approach, it is important to note that the origins of the D-Wave approach to quantum computation arose not from the conventional quantum information field, but from experimental condensed matter physics.