00:00 Speaker A
you guys have obviously seen big revenue growth as you’ve been signing these new contracts. Do you expect at some point to see sort of this critical mass explosive growth as you gain more and more traction and adoption of the technology.
00:22 Alan
So the short answer to the question is yes. Uh, we have had a good year. Uh, in the first half of the year, we had roughly 290% year-over-year revenue growth, uh, roughly 400% year-over-year growth in gross profit. Um, we’re continuing to add new customers. We’re continuing to grow both our uh quantum computer as a service business, which is what customers use to run applications as well as our system sales business, putting systems on premises. For example, we sold a system to the Ulik Supercomputing Center. We uh, we just uh announced the placement of a system here uh in uh the Lake Como region. We uh signed a memorandum of understanding for acquisition of a system in Korea. So we’re driving both the uh application support portion of our business quantum computers a service, as well as system sales. And I do believe there are a few applications that will really drive uh what you call explosive growth. Two that I’ve mentioned before are blockchain and AI. In both of those areas, our quantum computers are able to support the underlying core computation, um much faster and with much less energy consumption. And I think that’s going to be a real game changer across those two environments. For example, if Bitcoin mining today was being done on a new quantum proof of work that we developed on our quantum computer, we would be consuming 1,000 times less electricity than what’s being consumed today to do mining. and we’re in the process of working to bring that to AI as well.
02:35 Speaker A
And Alan, the other thing I wanted to catch up with you about is um, sort of regulation, but also initiative. In other words, the last time we talked, we talked about the US approach to quantum versus say the Chinese approach to quantum from a government perspective in investing in the industry. Um, you know, where where are we at this point? And you know, and if you could address Washington directly, what would you say that you want them to do on this front?
03:13 Alan
I think the quantum industry is still waiting uh to see what the US government is actually going to end up doing in this arena. Um, you know, we’ve talked about this before. The National Quantum Initiative that’s the premier funding mechanism for Quantum in the US that was originally authorized in Trump’s first administration, still has not yet been renewed. And so, you know, we are essentially waiting for the government to get its act together and move forward with support for the quantum industry. In addition, I think it’s really important for the US government to start expanding how it thinks about quantum because up until now, what it has done has been primarily focused on long-term research for just one architectural approach to quantum. As a result, it is missing other approaches to quantum like annealing, which is something that we at D-Wave have brought to the market, and it’s also missing a focus on near-term applications. Again, like what we are doing today with a broad array of customers and what we could do to help the US government as well benefit from quantum today, not many years in the future.
