As a company built and maintained on a deep foundation of technology, Amazon.com (AMZN -1.64%) is always looking to hone its competitive edge. Its latest attempt in this regard is, apparently, the development of proprietary quantum computing.
According to a report from Bloomberg published on Tuesday, internal job postings the media company had gained access to and information on LinkedIn strongly suggest that Amazon aims to build a quantum computer. The company is seeking to hire experts for a quantum hardware team, which will be housed inside its Amazon Web Services Center, said the report.
Image source: Amazon.com.
Additionally, the LinkedIn page of a current company employee named Marc Runyan describes him as "Quantum Research Scientist at the Amazon Center for Quantum Computing."
Today's standard computers store information in binary form as either 0s or 1s, in units called bits. Quantum computers instead are based on so-called qubits, which can be both numbers simultaneously, or exist in states between them.
IT pundits claim that this promises to make computing much faster and far more powerful for a very wide variety of uses. So far, there has been no significant rollout or use case of quantum computing, although the technology is advancing rapidly.
Although Amazon does not yet have a proprietary quantum computer, it has rolled out a quantum services platform known as Amazon Braket. This opened for general availability in August, and allows developers to test and run quantum algorithms with a variety of tools.
Amazon has not yet commented on the report.
