Vancouver’s D-Wave Makes Cover of TIME Magazine for Quantum Computing Innovation

Vancouver-based quantum computing company D-Wave has been getting a lot of recognition lately for its innovative, groundbreaking technology, including being named one of the world’s smartest tech companies.

Now the once unknown firm has made the cover of TIME magazine for its so-called “infinity machine,” which promises to solve incredibly complex problems and is backed by the likes of NASA and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos—yet it’s virtually impossible to explain how it actually works.

Here’s a snippet from TIME’s article, titled “The Quantum Quest for a Revolutionary Computer“:

The D-Wave Two is an unusual computer, and D-Wave is an unusual company. It’s small, and it has very few customers, but they’re blue-chip: they include the defense contractor Lockheed Martin; a computing lab that’s hosted by NASA and largely funded by Google; and a U.S. intelligence agency that D-Wave executives decline to name.

The reason D-Wave has so few customers is that it makes a new type of computer called a quantum computer that’s so radical and strange, people are still trying to figure out what it’s for and how to use it. It could represent an enormous new source of computing power —it has the potential to solve problems that would take conventional computers centuries, with revolutionary consequences for fields ranging from cryptography to nanotechnology, pharmaceuticals to artificial intelligence.

And here’s a bigger version of the TIME cover: