D-Wave Quantum

D-Wave was founded by Haig Farris , Geordie Rose , Bob Wiens , and Alexandre Zagoskin . Farris taught a business course at the University of British Columbia , where Rose obtained his PhD, and Zagoskin was a postdoctoral fellow. The company name refers to their first qubit designs, which used d-wave superconductors.

D-Wave operated as an offshoot from UBC, while maintaining ties with the Department of Physics and Astronomy. It funded academic research in quantum computing, thus building a collaborative network of research scientists. The company collaborated with several universities and institutions, including UBC, IPHT Jena, Université de Sherbrooke, University of Toronto, University of Twente, Chalmers University of Technology, University of Erlangen, and Jet Propulsion Laboratory. These partnerships were listed on D-Wave's website until 2005. In June 2014, D-Wave announced a new quantum applications ecosystem with computational finance firm 1QB Information Technologies and cancer research group DNA-SEQ to focus on solving real-world problems with quantum hardware.On May 11, 2011, D-Wave Systems announced D-Wave One, described as "the world's first commercially available quantum computer", operating on a 128-qubit chipset using quantum annealing to solve optimization problems. The D-Wave One was built on early prototypes such as D-Wave's Orion Quantum Computer. The prototype was a 16-qubit quantum annealing processor, demonstrated on February 13, 2007, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. D-Wave demonstrated what they claimed to be a 28-qubit quantum annealing processor on November 12, 2007. The chip was fabricated at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Microdevices Lab in Pasadena, California.In May 2013, a collaboration between NASA, Google and the Universities Space Research Association launched a Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab based on the D-Wave Two 512-qubit quantum computer that would be used for research into machine learning, among other fields of study.On August 20, 2015, D-Wave Systems announced the general availability of the D-Wave 2X system, a 1000-qubit+ quantum computer. This was followed by an announcement on September 28, 2015, that it had been installed at the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab at NASA Ames Research Center.

In January 2017, D-Wave released the D-Wave 2000Q and an open source repository containing software tools for quantum annealers. It contains Qbsolv, which is a piece of open-source software that solves QUBO problems on both company's quantum processors and classic hardware architectures.

D-Wave operated from various locations in Vancouver, British Columbia, and laboratory spaces at UBC before moving to its current location in the neighboring suburb of Burnaby. D-Wave also has offices in Palo Alto and Vienna, USA.