Amazon on Thursday revealed its first chip for quantum computing, and said its design will help the company build highly efficient hardware systems.
The processor is called Ocelot, and the announcement comes as more tech companies tout their advancements in quantum. Last week, Amazon cloud rival Microsoft showed off its inaugural quantum chip. Microsoft had a paper in the journal Nature documenting its quantum work, and this week Amazon followed suit.
Some technologists hope quantum computers will be capable of solving problems that stump classical computers. PCs and phones run calculations and store data with bits that are either on or off, while quantum computers work with quantum bits, or qubits, that can operate in both states simultaneously.
“We believe that scaling Ocelot to a full-fledged quantum computer capable of transformative societal impact would requireas little as one-tenth as many resources as common approaches, helping bring closer the age of practical quantum computing,” Fernando Brandão, Amazon Web Services’ director of applied science, and Oskar Painter, the cloud group’s quantum hardware chief, wrote in a blog post.
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has funded quantum computing research for two decades, but the technology has been slow to make its way to consumers and businesses.
“That’s because they’re not big enough yet,” said Peter Barrett, founder and general partner at Playground Global, which has backed quantum startups Phasecraft and PsiQuantum.
At a million qubits, there are enough bits that the technology will work even if there are some problems, Barrett said. Google’s Willow, the world’s top quantum chip, features just 105, while Amazon’s Ocelot has only nine, Painter told CNBC.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in 2020, when he was head of AWS, that the company was “optimistic in the future that quantum computing will play a role” as cloud gets bigger in large companies and the public sector.
Six months after Jassy made those comments, AWS released the Amazon Braket service, allowing developers to experiment with quantum computers from other companies, including IonQ and Rigetti Computing. Microsoft’s Azure cloud has a similar offering. Amazon is planning for its in-house quantum chip to become available through Braket, Painter said.
In 2023, AWS senior vice president Peter DeSantis talked about building a quantum processor at the cloud group’s Reinvent conference in Las Vegas, promising more details in the future.
Like Microsoft, Amazon fabricated its chip internally. Building a system boasting a million qubits will take collaborations with world-leading semiconductor manufacturers, according to Barrett. Outsourcing to a partner is an option as Amazon progresses with quantum hardware, Painter said.
Public interest in the space has risen lately, Painter said, as companies have discussed new ways of assembling qubits that are resistant to errors. Amazon designed Ocelot to tackle the problem of error correction, and Google’s Willow also demonstrated improvements in that area, Painter said.
Painter estimated that commercial workloads won’t be running on quantum computers for 10 years or more.
At a meeting with analysts in January, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said useful quantum computers could be 15 to 30 years away. Days later, Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan that he isn’t a quantum computing expert but said most people believe it’s at least a decade from being viable.
Pat Gelsinger, Intel’s former CEO, is more optimistic.
“I stand by my prediction years ago — by 2030, useful quantum computing,” Gelsinger wrote in a LinkedIn comment on Wednesday.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos leaves Aman Venice hotel, on the second day of the wedding festivities of Bezos and journalist Lauren Sanchez, in Venice, Italy, June 27, 2025.
Yara Nardi | Reuters
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos unloaded more than 3.3 million shares of his company in a sale valued at roughly $736.7 million, according to a financial filing on Tuesday.
The stock sale is part of a previously arranged trading plan adopted by Bezos in March. Under that arrangement, Bezos plans to sell up to 25 million shares of Amazon over a period ending May 29, 2026.
Bezos, who stepped down as Amazon’s CEO in 2021 but remains chairman, has been selling stock in the company at a regular clip in recent years, though he’s still the largest individual shareholder. He adopted a similar trading plan in February 2024 to sell up to 50 million shares of Amazon stock through late January of this year.
Bezos previously said he’d sell about $1 billion in Amazon stock each year to fund his space exploration company, Blue Origin. He’s also donated shares to Day 1 Academies, his nonprofit that’s building a chain of Montessori-inspired preschools across several states.
The most recent stock sale comes after Bezos and Lauren Sanchez tied the knot last week in a lavish wedding in Venice. The star-studded celebration, which took place over three days and sparked protests from some local residents, was estimated to cost around $50 million.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai addresses the crowd during Google’s annual I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California on May 20, 2025.
Camille Cohen | AFP | Getty Images
The Google Doodle is Alphabet’s most valuable piece of real estate, and on Tuesday, the company used that space to promote “AI Mode,” its latest AI search product.
Google’s Chrome browser landing pages and Google’s home page featured an animated image that, when clicked, leads users to AI Mode, the company’s latest search product. The doodle image also includes a share button.
The promotion of AI Mode on the Google Doodle comes as the tech company makes efforts to expose more users to its latest AI features amid pressure from artificial intelligence startups. That includes OpenAI which makes ChatGPT, Anthropic which makes Claude and Perplexity AI, which bills itself as an “AI-powered answer engine.”
Google’s “Doodle” Tuesday directed users to its search chatbot-like experience “AI Mode”
AI Mode is Google’s chatbot-like experience for complex user questions. The company began displaying AI Mode alongside its search results page in March.
“Search whatever’s on your mind and get AI-powered responses,” the product description reads when clicked from the home page.
AI Mode is powered by Google’s flagship AI model Gemini, and the tool has rolled out to more U.S. users since its launch. Users can ask AI Mode questions using text, voice or images. Google says AI Mode makes it easier to find answers to complex questions that might have previously required multiple searches.
In May, Google tested the AI Mode feature directly beneath the Google search bar, replacing the “I’m Feeling Lucky” widget — a place where Google rarely makes changes.
Disposable diapers are a massive environmental offender. Roughly 300,000 of them are sent to landfills or incinerated every minute, according to the World Economic Forum, and they take hundreds of years to decompose. It’s a $60 billion business.
One alternative approach has been compostable diapers, which can be made out of wood pulp or bamboo. But composting services aren’t universally available and some of the products are less absorbent than normal nappies, critics say.
A growing number of parents are also turning to cloth diapers, but they only make up about 20% of the U.S. market.
ZymoChem is attacking the diaper problem from a different angle. Harshal Chokhawala, CEO of ZymoChem, said that 60% to 80% of a typical diaper consists of fossil-based plastics. And half of that is an ingredient called super absorbent polymer, or SAP.
“What we have created is a low carbon footprint bio-based and biodegradable version of this super absorbent polymer,” Chokhawala said.
ZymoChem, with operations in San Leandro, California, and Burlington, Vermont, invented this new type of absorbent by using a fermentation process to convert a renewable resource — sugar — from corn into biodegradable materials. It’s similar to making beer.
“We’re at a point now where we’re very close to being at cost parity with fossil based manufacturing of super absorbents,” said Chokhawala.
The company’s drop-in absorbents can be added into other diapers, which makes it different from environmentally conscious companies like Charlie Banana, Kudos and Hiro, which sell their own brand of diapers.
ZymoChem doesn’t yet have a diaper product on the market. But Lindy Fishburne, managing partner at Breakout Ventures and an investor in the company, says it’s a scalable model.
“Being able to build and grow with biology allows us to unlock a circular economy and a supply chain that is no longer petro-derived, which opens up the opportunities of where you can manufacture and how you secure supply chains,” Fishburne said.
Other investors include Toyota Ventures, GS Futures, KDT Ventures, Cavallo Ventures and Lululemon. The company has raised a total of $35 million.
The Lululemon partnership shows that it’s not just about diapers. ZymoChem’s bio-based materials can also be used in other hygiene products and in bio-based nylon. Lululemon recently said it will use it in some of its leggings, which were traditionally made with petroleum.