D-Wave Quantum

In this Vendor Showdown session, Murray Thom from D-Wave Quantum presents the company's approach to energy-efficient quantum computing. He argues that quantum computing scales fundamentally differently from classical computing: while quantum processor integration doubles like Moore's Law, the complexity of machine instructions grows exponentially rather than linearly. He cites a magnetic materials simulation benchmark comparing D-Wave's Advantage 2 quantum computer with the Frontier supercomputer, claiming the classical system would need nearly a million years and as much electricity as the world uses annually, whereas the Advantage 2 completed it in about 20 minutes using under a dollar of electricity. Thom describes D-Wave's dual-platform strategy combining quantum annealing (moving between solutions quickly for optimization and AI applications) and gate-model systems (storing more information for molecular simulation and fault-tolerant research), and notes work combining both for quantum dynamics, transport, and localization studies. Customer examples include Pattison Food Group saving 50,000 workforce hours annually, NTT Docomo reducing paging signals by 15 percent, Ford Otosan cutting vehicle scheduling from 30 to 5 minutes, and Shionogi using annealing as a quantum neural net to find drug candidates. In the Q&A, Thom addresses sustainability potential for HPC, ethical use of quantum and AI (referencing employed ethicists and Isaac Asimov), the system's physical footprint (roughly three meters cubed, refrigerator-scale with a single silicon chip), comparable pricing to a large GPU cluster, and low operational overhead, noting the helium is a closed-cycle system and liquid nitrogen is easy to manage.