Amazon Web Services (AWS) will now offer access to quantum computers Imaginechina Limited / Alamy Stock Photo
The quantum computing race has a new competitor. Amazon has announced it will partner with three firms to offer online access to prototype quantum processors.
Through a new service called Amazon Braket, customers will be able to test algorithms and calculations on quantum processors from D-Wave Systems, IonQ and Rigetti Computing.
Each of these three firms takes a different approach to making such processors, which rely on subatomic quantum effects. IonQ鈥檚 version uses trapped ions manipulated by lasers as quantum bits 鈥 or qubits, which are the equivalent to bits in classical computers. Rigetti uses superconducting qubits, as does D-Wave, but the latter鈥檚 device is a more limited system known as a quantum annealer, rather than a full-blown computer.
Advertisement
These various approaches to qubits all have drawbacks. 鈥淚 think for Amazon they鈥檙e looking at this also as a time to see which one鈥檚 really going to work,鈥 says Peter Chapman at IonQ. 鈥淧ut us all on the聽marketplace and see who wins.鈥
Because quantum computers are finicky and expensive to maintain, Amazon has, for now, decided to partner with these firms rather than compete with the likes of Google and IBM by building its own device.
鈥淚 think it is safe to say that most organizations will never own a quantum computer, and will find the cloud-based, on-demand model a better fit. It may well be the case that production-scale quantum computers are the first cloud-only technology,鈥 wrote Jeff Barr at Amazon Web Services in a .
“There鈥檚 no task any of these machines can solve these days that you can鈥檛 solve with your laptop or a cluster of computers. So for any practical purposes, this is premature,” says Itay Hen at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. But he thinks that with Amazon acting as a front-end, more people will gain experience with quantum computers.
“Using them is not very easy, so they鈥檙e kind of providing an intermediate step and saying to the user, you don鈥檛 need to know anything about quantum computers to use them,” says Hen.
Amazon Braket isn鈥檛 the first聽cloud quantum computing service; Microsoft and IBM offer their own versions. The three firms involved with Braket have also made sessions on their processors available separately in the past.
Amazon could yet try to build a quantum computer. A spokesperson says the company will develop quantum hardware in the future.
![Astronomers have long known that understanding how star clusters come to be is key to unlocking other secrets of galactic evolution. Stars form in clusters, created when clouds of gas collapse under gravity. As more and more stars are born in a collapsing cloud, strong stellar winds, harsh ultraviolet radiation and the supernova explosions of massive stars eventually disperse the cloud, and their light can bear down on other star-forming regions in the galaxy. This process is called stellar feedback, and it means that most of the gas in a galaxy never gets used for star formation. Researching how star clusters develop can answer questions about star formation at a galactic scale. Now, the state of the art has been further developed with both Hubble and Webb working together to provide a broad-spectrum view of thousands of young star clusters. An international team of astronomers has pored over images of four nearby galaxies from the FEAST observing programme (#1783), trying to solve this mystery. Their results show that it is the most massive star clusters that clear away their gaseous shroud the fastest, and begin lighting their galaxy the earliest. The team identified nearly 9000 star clusters in the four galaxies in different evolutionary stages: young clusters just starting to emerge from their natal clouds of gas, clusters that had partially dispersed the gas (both from Webb images), and fully unobstructed clusters visible in optical light (found in Hubble images). With Webb???s ability to peer inside the gas clouds, they were able to then estimate the mass and age of each cluster from its light spectrum. This image shows a section of one of the spiral arms of Messier 51 (M51), one of the four galaxies studied in this work, as seen by Webb???s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). The thick clumps of star-forming gas are shown here in red and orange, representing infrared light emitted by ionised gas, dust grains, and complex molecules such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Within these gas complexes, each tens or hundreds of light years across, Webb reveals the dense, extremely bright clusters of massive stars that have just recently formed. The countless stars strewn across the arm of the galaxy, many of which would be invisible to our eyes behind layers of dust, are also laid bare in infrared light. [Image description: A large, long portion of one of the spiral arms in galaxy M51. Red-orange, clumpy filaments of gas and dust that stretch in a chain from left to right comprise the arm. Shining cyan bubbles light up parts of the gas clouds from within, and gaps expose bright star clusters in these bubbles as glowing white dots. The whole image is dotted with small stars. A faint blue glow around the arm colours the otherwise dark background.]](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/13114322/SEI_296271016.jpg)
