Sundar Pichai and Daniel Sank, right, with one of Google's Quantum Computers in the Santa Barbara lab, in California.Handout ./Reuters
Christian Weedbrook is founder of the quantum technologies company Xanadu.
Data centres are the backbone of all of our digital lives. They are used behind the scenes by most companies to store and process information for streaming services, e-commerce, search, social media, and more recently artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT.
In essence, a data centre is a collection of computer server racks housed in a physically secure facility requiring large amounts of electricity and water. The server racks are connected to each other by fibre optic cables, shuttling information between them.
It’s a domain we don’t often think of, even if we all rely on services that originate from it. And in this domain, a crisis is coming. The growth of what the industry calls “compute” – another way of describing the processing power of the data centres – is unsustainable as it demands increasingly vast amounts of energy and resources and exacerbates environmental challenges.
Along with this extreme usage comes significant problems. Data centres currently count for 1.5 per cent of the world’s energy consumption and this is projected to increase. All of this is leading to concerns both here in Canada and abroad that we don’t have enough energy for our future data centre ambitions. One of the biggest drivers of this increase in data centre usage is AI; by 2027, it is estimated that AI applications will account for 20 per cent to 25 per cent of all such usage.
A number of solutions are being considered. These include powering data centres using nuclear, “sun-chasing” initiatives and the more traditional approaches of wind and solar power. But none of these solutions comes close.
Most forms of renewable energy are intermittent and can only be built on specific sites. Nuclear energy has a dangerous reputation, making widespread implementation difficult. And these solutions do nothing to address the underlying efficiency of the computations happening in these data centres, which are bounded by the domain of classical physics.
There is only one real solution: Quantum computing goes beyond this and enables exponential improvements in efficiency, allowing far more to be done per kilowatt-hour (kWh) of energy on certain applications.
A quantum computer is a computer that can perform certain important problems exponentially faster than normal computers by leveraging the properties of quantum physics. Small quantum computers exist today, but none exist at the scale of a data centre (scaling up while keeping their quantum-ness is hard).
Once built, a data centre containing quantum server racks will be half a football field in size, and networked using fibre optics. A single quantum data centre will have energy consumption similar to a single traditional data centre. But one quantum data centre, for key applications, will be equivalent to hundreds or thousands of standard data centres.
But by far the biggest energy savings will come from the innovation and discoveries of the quantum data centres helping to find more efficient ways of doing things. Such discoveries and others like it would perhaps take a century to achieve using traditional tools. A quantum data centre could deliver them much sooner.
It is only these data-centre-sized quantum computers that will be able to solve problems such as developing novel catalysts for the synthesis of synthetic hydrocarbons, new carbon capture and sequestration solutions, discovering new materials to create next-generation batteries.
The idea of quantum computing as the future of data centres has only recently begun to pick up steam. There have been significant investments by the Australian government to build a quantum data centre in Brisbane, and by the U.S. state of Illinois for a cryogenics facility (a key component of a quantum data centre) among other infrastructure in Chicago.
It is imperative that Canada follows suit; otherwise, from an economic-independence, national-security and energy point of view, it will be left behind.
Fortunately the foundation has been set. Canada has a long history of creating and supporting the talent in quantum computing with $1-billion being invested in quantum science between 2012 and 2022. Furthermore, in the 2021 federal budget, $360-million was announced for Canada’s National Quantum Strategy, and the Council of Canadian Academies estimates that quantum technologies could account for 3 per cent of Canada’s GDP by 2045. In its April budget, the Canadian government announced it will invest $2.4-billion in AI infrastructure to catch up with other countries – a field in which we were originally the leaders.
Let’s not make the same mistakes for quantum and invest in quantum data centres early.