Quantum Innovation Center

[william]

LOCKHEED MARTIN JUST BUILT A QUANTUM CENTER TO WEAPONIZE THE TECHNOLOGY

Lockheed launched the Quantum Innovation Center, a single hub for quantum research, development, and prototypes across the company. The stated model is its AI Center, which they opened twenty years ago and now credits with putting AI into national security systems. Lockheed is telling you it thinks quantum is where AI was back then.The company has been at this longer than most people know. It bought the first commercial quantum computer ever sold, a D-Wave system, in 2011, and has run quantum navigation, communications, and sensing programs for fifteen years.

The new center pulls all of it together, plus the outside pieces. Lockheed Martin Ventures, just expanded to a $1 billion fund, with $100 million earmarked for UK and European quantum, and a Swiss hub with IBM at ETH Zurich anchored by Switzerland's first IBM quantum computer. Two internal programs, a talent pipeline and a fund for employee R&D projects, are there to grow the workforce, which is the part a prime only builds when it plans to ship something.

The priority list is the tell, sensing, navigation and timing, then computing. A defense contractor's quantum center leads with the sensors. That matches everything else this month, the Pentagon's Farseer program, the GPS-free Pacific flight, the DARPA helicopter program Lockheed is the platform partner for, and Lockheed's own venture stake in the quantum camera startup Diffraqtion and their partnerships with companies like @qctrlHQ and $IONQ.

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