Microsoft’s Quantum-Computing Services Attract New Customers – The Wall Street Journal

Toyota Tsusho’s goal over the next several years is to see how quantum computers could help speed up solutions to problems related to mobility services, including route planning, fleet management and traffic jam analysis, said Toru Awashima, project general manager at the affiliate of Toyota Motor Corp.

Toyota Tsusho, which counts the car maker as its top shareholder, has been working with other quantum computing companies including D-Wave Systems Inc. since 2016 to determine how the technology could eventually solve mobility problems.

“We need to find a very fast and good solution for those kinds of complex optimization problems,” Mr. Awashima said. “Quantum computing is one of the promising candidates for that.”

To that end, Toyota Tsusho and quantum computing firm Jij conducted a traffic optimization experiment ending this month using Azure Quantum. The companies found that quantum algorithms running on traditional computers could reduce waiting time for drivers stopped at red lights by about 20%, saving an average of about 5 seconds for each car, according to Jij.

Jij, founded in late 2018 by theoretical physicists, helps business customers such as Toyota Tsusho experiment with quantum computing services from vendors including Microsoft.

By harnessing quantum physics, quantum computers have the potential to sort through a vast number of possibilities in nearly real time and come up with a probable solution. While traditional computers store information as either zeros or ones, quantum computers use quantum bits, or qubits, which represent and store information as both zeros and ones simultaneously. A commercial-grade quantum computer hasn’t been built yet.

Microsoft announced its foray into quantum computing services aimed at software developers last November. The tech giant joins

Alphabet Inc.’s

Google and

International Business Machines Corp.

in a race to commercialize the emerging technology.

Azure Quantum’s competitive advantage lies in preparing developers for commercial-grade quantum computers, said Matthew Brisse, an analyst at research firm

Gartner Inc.

“This is truly their leg up,” said Mr. Brisse, research vice president of infrastructure strategies at Gartner. Developers capable of using commercial-grade quantum computers when they launch in the next few years will be in high demand, and businesses are finding that they should start preparing now, Mr. Brisse said. Companies in the financial services, automotive and pharmaceutical sectors have already started experimenting with quantum computing.

Azure Quantum provides developers with an online platform to develop algorithms and applications for quantum computers without having to rewrite their code when hardware and algorithms get more advanced. Developers can also experiment with quantum algorithms on traditional machines, as the Toyota Tsusho project did, and customers also have access to early-stage quantum-computing hardware from other vendors.

Azure Quantum is currently available to a select number of undisclosed customers, said Julie Love, principal group program manager at Microsoft Quantum Systems. She didn’t say whether any of the customers were paying for its services, however the services are expected to be available to all Azure cloud customers later this year.

Microsoft has eight quantum computing labs around the world, including one at its headquarters in Redmond, Wash., which has 29 open positions on its website. The company is also developing its own quantum computer that relies on topology, a branch of mathematics that studies geometric objects that experience physical changes, but it isn’t accessible to the company’s clients. Microsoft says the topological approach can help a quantum computer run algorithms more reliably, with fewer risks of temperature or noise hurting the accuracy of a calculation or preventing it from being completed.

Write to Sara Castellanos at sara.castellanos@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications

Jij has a partnership with Microsoft. An earlier version of this story mischaracterized Toyota Tsusho as a partner. (Corrected on May 19.)