Situated in what now constitutes the border triangle between Switzerland, Germany and France, the Swiss city of Basel has almost always been part of a frontier, at one point serving as a meeting point of the Holy Roman Empire, the Kingdom of Germany and the Duchy of Burgundy.
Now, thanks in large part to an investment of half a billion Swiss francs from the Staehelins, a family with roots in the city dating back 500 years, Basel is positioning itself at the nexus of digital frontiers: quantum computing and AI.
QuantumBasel, Switzerland’s first commercial quantum computing hub, aims to help corporates and startups test the ability of hybrid quantum and AI solutions to solve intractable problems. In the two years since its launch it has conducted around 15 projects with companies, startups, and universities, including Pfizer, Vinci Energies and Cancer Genomics Consults.
“We envision a future where organizations harness quantum technology’s revolutionary power to drive transformative progress across industries,” says Quantum Basel CEO Damir Bogdan, an experienced technology industry executive and expert on the impact of tech on future business strategy. “Our ecosystem is built on four core pillars: quantum computing, artificial intelligence, scientific expertise and strategic know-how. These areas of focus allow us to drive interdisciplinary research and deliver solutions that address complex challenges in industries such as financial services, logistics, life sciences and manufacturing,” he says.
QuantumBasel provides access to quantum hardware from competitors IBM, D-Wave and IonQ and, by connecting directly to its network of AI technology partners, clients are also offered on-premise access to over 500 H100 graphic processing units (GPUs) from NVIDIA and IBM artificial intelligence unit (AIU) chips through Phoenix Technologies as well as access to Red Hat OpenShift. Its team of quantum and data scientists trains and supports companies, conducts projects in quantum computing and AI, and collaborates closely with universities and academic institutions.
It is nestled in a 70,000 square meter innovation campus called uptownBasel, which focuses on enabling Industry 5.0. (A vision of what the campus is expected to look like by the 2030s is pictured with the story). The campus is in the historic Schorenareal district, a place where electric motors and locomotives used to be assembled. Today the focus is on modern-day industrial production, healthcare, and logistics as well as the cross-sectional function of digitalization.
Monique and Thomas Staehelin are financing it because they see the campus as a hedge against the de-industrialization of Switzerland and as a way of ensuring that Europe remains competitive in cutting-edge technologies and sustainability, says Bogdan, who also serves as CTO of the campus.
Along with offering access to quantum and AI hardware, uptownBasel is known for its sustainability practices, showcasing an integrated use of waste heat from planned data centers and a modern wood chip facility that uses waste wood to supply the entire site with energy and power some 30,000 neighboring households.
Applying Hybrid Quantum to Everything From Factory Planning To Cancer Care
Combining AI and quantum-like technologies can improve business outcomes across a broad spectrum of industries from financial services and healthcare to aerospace and manufacturing, says industry experts. While quantum computing is a young technology that is not yet mainstream and still needs to clearly demonstrate “quantum advantages”, quantum and quantum-inspired algorithms can already serve as additional techniques in a data scientist’s toolbox.
For example, with QuantumBasel’s help global pharma company Pfizer tested a quantum hybrid solution to enable data-driven optimization of production processes. Handling complex and large amounts of data generated in today’s production environments is challenging. There is no way to adapt in real time to changes in demand, production, or machine availability. Efficiency is often affected by sub-optimal use of resources, increasing production costs and delivery delays.
Pfizer wanted to make the most of its resources with a dynamic production plan that would allow it to respond instantly to market changes. The goal was to see if it could leverage quantum technology to achieve greater performance and cost savings by reducing bottlenecks, shortening lead times, and optimizing production cycles.
Initial tests show a significant reduction in the time to make products. Late deliveries were reduced while precedence violations, machine overlap violations, and closing hour violations were eliminated according to results published by Pfizer.
Vinci Energy approached QuantumBasel because it wanted to test quantum optimization of air conditioning technology. During the construction of a building, the design of the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) network involves several steps. One of the final steps in the HVAC design process is called “network generation.” This step, which ensures that all HVAC elements are correctly connected while meeting safety and sustainability requirements, is computationally very expensive or even prohibitive. The challenge was to optimize the design of HVAC duct networks in new buildings by minimizing the cost of the duct layout while efficiently delivering the required airflow. The current semi-automated solution used by VINCI Energies is labor-intensive and costly, requiring significant manual work by engineers.
As part of the solution, QuantumBasel and its technology partner D-Wave created a hybrid quantum-classical model to solve VINCI Energies’ HVAC duct network design problem. This approach leveraged quantum computing’s ability to address complex optimization challenges by evaluating different configurations of duct placement more efficiently than traditional methods. Several models were proposed during the project, and the one that best balanced accuracy and cost-effectiveness was selected and implemented. The selected model reduced effort by integrating improved modeling techniques and using both classical and quantum computing resources to reduce manual engineering and optimize design parameters such as duct lengths, diameters, connections, and room crossings. The solution outperformed the previous semi-automated method on all performance metrics and achieved a significant reduction in duct length, resulting in significant savings in materials, construction costs, and engineering time, demonstrating the potential of quantum computing in real-world engineering applications, according to QuantumBasel.
Meanwhile, Cancer Genomics Consults, which aims to advance cancer care through precision genomic analysis for healthcare providers, approached QuantumBasel with a different kind of challenge. Cancer genomics is a critical elements of precision oncology, which uses broad genomic profiling of tumor tissue or blood to identify biomarkers or sensitivity or resistance to various cancer therapies. The lab reports for these tests are often 20-50 pages long, impractical for integration into the workflow of practicing oncologists and difficult for even experts to interpret, sometimes leading to wrong diagnoses and sub-optimal treatment choices. The project goal was to develop an AI workflow that integrates retrieval (searching for relevant information) with generation (creating text based on retrieved information) to improve the quality of output and produce more informed and accurate results.
Several state-of-the-art open-source components and a customized large language model (LLM) with local data storage and processing were used to improve the accuracy, explainability, and transparency of the data flow. An open-source LLM was fine-tuned through supervised and reinforcement learning based on input from a genomics expert. CGC experts were able to provide the AI with the correct answers to genomic questions, which served as ground truth. The model was then tested in multiple iterations on new datasets to evaluate its ability to perform the task. Through a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) users are able to upload a document (the cancer report) and chat with the document.
The solution resulted in a 90% reduction in text reading time and analysis work and a 24% increase in hardware efficiency, according to QuantumBasel. An investigation of how quantum reinforcement learning and other quantum machine learning techniques could enhance the computational pipeline for interpreting genomic reports will be explored in future steps.
Improving Business Outcomes And Combating Climate Change
These case studies are early examples of the potential of quantum computing, which taps into the unusual behavior of atomic and sub-atomic particles to perform far more complex calculations at a massively increased speed compared to today’s computers, while using less energy. The hope is that this could lead to breakthroughs in drug discovery and previously unsolvable problems as well as solutions that have the potential to generate higher returns for business. Although fault-tolerant quantum computing hardware is still some time away, there are aspects of quantum physics and technology that can be commercialized in the near term with no need for fault-tolerant quantum computers.
Using a combination of quantum-like technologies and AI can be a hedge against the day that fault-tolerant quantum computers become a reality. Since quantum computing is a step-change technology with substantial barriers to adoption, industry pundits say early movers will seize a large share of the total value, while those who have not prepared may not be able to catch up and could see their businesses threatened overnight.
That’s not all. Meeting the goal of Net-Zero emissions that countries and some industries have committed to won’t be possible without huge advances in climate technology that aren’t achievable today. Even the most powerful supercomputers available now are not able to solve some of these problems. Quantum computing could be a game changer in those areas, according to McKinsey, helping reduce emissions in some of the most challenging or emissions-intensive areas, such as agriculture or direct-air capture, and could accelerate improvements in technologies required at great scale, such as solar panels or batteries.
Investing In The Future
For these reasons and more, uptownBasel is betting on quantum and AI. Along with helping corporate clients, it funded a professorship in quantum computing at a local university and helps educate students and researchers in labs on how to use the technologies. “Once they have an idea, we can help them bring it from the lab to industry,” says Bogdan. “If you want to manage the challenges of the future, one needs to learn to master the technologies of the future. Quantum and AI are those technologies.”
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