India can play a role in advancing quantum computing: Arvind Krishna

India has a primary role to play in advancing the future of quantum computing with a strong scientific and engineering culture, as well as the spirit of innovation, said Arvind Krishna, chairman & CEO, IBM. “India has the right attributes play a leadership role,” said Krishna, speaking at the Infinity Forum organised by the International Financial Services Centres Authority (IFSCA) and GIFT City.

Quantum computing will be the next great leap in technology, with the ability to solve problems beyond the reach of today’s computers. “Together with hybrid cloud and artificial intelligence, quantum computing is a foundational technology that the world needs to make sense of the physical world around us,” said Krishna.

While quantum computing will find application across areas like drug discovery, agriculture and climate models among others, Krishna said that the earliest impact one was likely to see was in finance. “The possibilities it opens up in finance will be far reaching consequences,” said Krishna, adding that this would happen in the next five years.

People and organisations need to start learning quantum skills now as this will prove to be a competitive advantage once quantum computing becomes reality.

Pointing out that the finance industry has always been an early adopter of technologies, from mainframes to cloud computing, Krishna said that most financial calculations are really optimization problems. And complex optimization is what quantum computers are good at. McKinsey has identified the 100 most prominent use cases for quantum computing, and of this, 28 of them were in finance. “Some of the world’s toughest optimization problems in finance, would require a colossal amount of computation power. And asking classical computers to sequentially compute or billions of combinations is far from ideal. It’s too much time and too much money. So even for some of today’s fastest supercomputers, running these combinations, is not feasible,” said Krishna.

IBM is running experiments through the IBM Quantum Experience with over 170 partners and has over 20 of these computers accessible to people through the cloud. Last month, the company revealed the first commercial quantum computer that broke the 100-qubit barrier. Qubit measures the power of a quantum computer. It will make a 127-qubit quantum processer available to certain network members and gradually, more widely available.

The company has said that it intends to build a 1000 qubit quantum computer by 2023.

Stay on top of technology and startup news that matters. Subscribe to our daily newsletter for the latest and must-read tech news, delivered straight to your inbox.