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Cisco is making a significant move into quantum networking technology.<\/span><\/p>\n Last week, the company announced two milestones intended to make “quantum computing practical years ahead of current timelines,” according to a <\/span>blog post<\/a><\/span> by Vijoy Pandey, GM and senior vice president of Outshift by Cisco, the company’s emerging technologies incubation engine.<\/span><\/p>\n First, Cisco introduced a quantum network entanglement chip. The research prototype is designed to enable quantum networks to scale and connect quantum processors for practical applications, per the post.<\/span><\/p>\n The company also opened <\/span>Cisco Quantum Labs<\/a><\/span>, a Santa Monica research facility where scientists and engineers are working on the future of quantum networking technologies.<\/span><\/p>\n The challenge for Cisco — and every company trying to make quantum computing a reality — is that today’s quantum processors have only hundreds of qubits, while uniquely quantum applications require millions. This is why even the most ambitious quantum computing roadmaps currently only target a few thousand qubits by the early 2030s.<\/span><\/p>\n Looking back, classical computing faced a similar scaling challenge. It couldn’t scale until the industry could connect smaller nodes over a network to create more powerful, distributed systems within data centers, and later the cloud. Pandey discussed this issue on an analyst call, saying how the future of quantum isn’t “a single monolithic quantum computer.” Instead, the way forward is to create scaled-out <\/span>quantum data centers<\/a><\/span>, “where processors work together through specialized networking,” he said.<\/span><\/p>\nAddressing Quantum Scaling<\/h2>\n