Ehningen, in southern Germany, looks like any other small European town. Located less than 30 km from Stuttgart, it has a library, a church, and a couple of restaurants, and its streets are filled with children playing football.
No one would expect that a few kilometres from the residential area lies an industrial hub, home to one of the most groundbreaking technological revolutions: the first International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) quantum computing data centre in Europe.
On October 1st, the US company officially launched its first quantum data centre in Europe – and only its second one worldwide – in Ehningen.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, along with CEOs, experts, and journalists, attended the ceremony for what was presented as a groundbreaking step towards the future of technology.
Quantum computers are extremely powerful computers that are expected to revolutionise our future.
While regular computers use bits that can be either 0 or 1, quantum computers use qubits. Qubits can be both 1 and 0 at the same time, which means they can explore many possible outcomes all at once.
Specifically, the Ehningen data centre has two Eagle processors, each with 127 qubits. But soon, IBM will be adding a third processor called Heron that will boost the centre’s performance.
Heron has 156 qubits and it’s the most powerful quantum chip the company has made so far.
“Heron was a completely new technology that we had to develop and that required completely different controls,” Jay Gambetta, vice president of IBM Quantum and IBM Fellow, told Euronews Tech Talks.
The Heron processors are 16 times more powerful and can run up to 25 times faster, all while reducing error rates.
“The hardest question that we need to answer as a
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