U.S. Navy’s SPAWAR will pay D-Wave for quantum computer training

A division of the U.S. Navy intends to pay Canadian company D-Wave to learn how to use its quantum computing infrastructure, according to a federal filing posted online on Monday.

The unit seeking this training is the Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific, known as SPAWAR or SSC-PAC for short, which is headquartered in San Diego and has previously researched amphibious throwable robots, unmanned aerial vehicles, virtual reality, and many other technologies. The filing does not actually cover the cost of quantum computing hardware. But NASA has been allowing SPAWAR scientists to learn how to use the D-Wave machine that it operates with Google at the NASA Ames Research Center, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported last month.

Quantum computers employ quantum bits, or qubits, each of which can be zero or one or both, unlike the regular bits in classical computers. The superposition of qubits lets machines perform great numbers of computations at once, making a quantum computer highly desirable for certain types of processes. Google recently found that quantum annealing with D-Wave hardware is 100 times faster than simulated annealing on a classic computer chip.

D-Wave also has deals in place with government contractor Lockheed Martin and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, among others.

Earlier this month, IBM launched a free cloud service for running experiments on a quantum chip at its T.J. Watson Research Center in New York. The chip was not manufactured by D-Wave, which last year disclosed a $29 million funding round.

Update on May 18: Removed references to the $11 million figure cited in the filing. The dollar amount refers to the U.S. Small Business Administration’s size standard for the work, not the size of the contract.