San Sebastián (EFE).- “The Basque Country will be as important for the history of quantum computing as Silicon Valley was for the Internet”, declared the world director of IBM Research, Darío Gil, during the presentation of the “quantum supercomputer” that will be will be installed in San Sebastián whose “potential” today is difficult to define.
quantum computing center
“We are making history”, the IBM manager remarked during the launch in the Gipuzkoan capital of this alliance, called Basque Quantum, in which the US computer giant, the Basque Government and the three provincial councils participate.
The presentation ceremony brought together this Friday at the Tabakalera building numerous representatives of the IBM leadership and the highest Basque authorities, headed by the lehendakari, Iñigo Urkullu, and the general deputies of the three territories.
This agreement will allow the Basque Country, specifically San Sebastián, to host a new IBM quantum computing center, which will house an “IBM Quantum System One”, the sixth in the world after those located in the United States, Germany, Japan , Canada and South Korea.
The Iberbasque Foundation, through financing from the Basque Government, will make an investment of 50.8 million euros, which the Basque councils will complement with different contributions for the development of the initiative in their territories.
Overcome binary code
The lehendakari has announced that, in total, the Basque Quantum project foresees a direct investment of more than 120 million euros until 2028 to promote a technology that, according to the president of Ikerbasque, Jokin Bildarratz, is called to “change the world”.
Darío Gil explained that the difference lies in the fact that “classical computers cannot provide effective solutions to many of the challenges humanity faces today because the binary code on which they are based, the famous ones and zeros, can only model an approach to our world”.
However, he stressed, “quantum computers process information in a new way, which allows them to capture the universe with all its precision” and “solve extraordinarily important problems that are unsolvable with classical computing.”
Darío Gil has highlighted the “enormously diverse applications” of this technology, for example, for the development of drugs, new materials, batteries or fertilizers.
Potential to change everything
The “potential” of quantum technology to “change everything” and the opportunity for the Basque Country to make history in this area has been the common thread of the act in which the Lehendakari, Iñigo Urkullu, has assured that this project represents a “great investment in the future.
“The Basque Country is committed to cutting-edge research and acquires the best tools for it,” stressed Urkullu, alluding to this pole that is already being built on the Ibaeta campus of the University of the Basque Country, which has ceded the land for this equipment .
The installation in San Sebastián of the most advanced quantum supercomputer of the six that IBM has around the world places our country at the forefront of this “disruptive” technology whose “purpose” is to “fly”, to do things that nobody imagined”.
“We are absolutely at the dawn of a new era,” explains Horacio Morell, president of IBM for Spain, Portugal, Greece and Israel, during an interview with EFE in which he went back to the mid-19th century to describe with a A concrete example of the impact that this new technology is going to have in a few years in today’s world.
“To make a comparison,” he explains, “traditional computing” would be comparable to the “cars, cars and trains” that people used to travel more than a hundred years ago when “nobody imagined that they could get into a device and fly”.
The goal is to “fly”
Now, with quantum computing, “the end is to fly.” “We are going to be able to do things that no one imagined and solve all kinds of problems”, sums up the IBM executive in a break at the presentation of “Basque Quantum”, the alliance between the US computer giant and the main Basque institutions that will allow the installation of the aforementioned supercomputer in the Gipuzkoan capital.
“Traditional classical computing -clarifies Morell- has taken us very far by handling a very large number of variables, but when we talk about more complex problems that already include an exponential number of variables, it is when quantum computing will allow us to address problems that now You cannot attack yourself.”
“We are talking about matters such as materials science, climate change, factorization or optimization problems,” says the manager, who foresees a special impact of this technology in fields such as industry, health science, the generation of new drugs, as well as in solving “logistical and mobility” problems.