THE cutting edge of the frontier of the world, of technology, of growth may sound like science fiction, but it is rapidly becoming economic fact.
Inside a Google facility in Santa Barbara, California lives Willow, the most powerful computer in the world. But this is no ordinary PC, it is a quantum computer.
In the words of BBC economics editor, Faisal Islam, “[it] looks like a golden chandelier and contains the coldest place in the known universe”, but contains “technology pivotal to financial security, Bitcoin, government secrets, the world economy and more”.
Willow is an oil barrel-sized series of round discs connected by hundreds of black control wires descending into a bronze liquid helium bath refrigerator keeping the quantum microchip a thousandth of a degree above absolute zero.