The Technology Year in Stories: December 2024

January 05, 2025

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Google announced its new quantum chip Willow in December 2024

We look at the articles that made the news in technology in 2024. Today, it is December, featuring Google's Willow quantum chip and Nvidia's AI predictions

How Google's Willow is A Quantum Leap in Computing Tech

Nations and tech giants are investing billions to harness the potential of quantum mechanics for computational tasks previously thought impossible.

This race has intensified as quantum computing moves from theoretical possibility to practical reality, with each advancement bringing us closer to solving complex problems in fields ranging from cryptography and drug discovery to climate modelling and financial analysis.

Amidst this pursuit of quantum computing supremacy, Google has created its latest breakthrough: the Willow quantum chip.

Google's journey in quantum computing, which began over a decade ago, has been marked by several milestone achievements, including their 2019 claim of quantum supremacy with the Sycamore processor.

Willow is the latest evolution in this trajectory, building upon years of research and development at Google Quantum AI, a division that has consistently pushed the boundaries of what's possible in quantum computing.

Unlike previous quantum processors that struggled with error rates and scalability, Willow achieves exponential error reduction and unprecedented computational speed, completing a task in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years - a number that vastly exceeds the age of the Universe.

Founder and Lead of Google Quantum AI, Hartmut Neven

According to Hartmut Neven, Founder and Lead of Google Quantum AI, Willow is instrumental to Google’s advancement in quantum computing: “The Willow chip is a major step on a journey that began over 10 years ago.

“When I founded Google Quantum AI in 2012, the vision was to build a useful, large-scale quantum computer that could harness quantum mechanics — the “operating system” of nature to the extent we know it today — to benefit society by advancing scientific discovery, developing helpful applications and tackling some of society's greatest challenges.

“As part of Google Research, our team has charted a long-term roadmap and Willow moves us significantly along that path towards commercially relevant applications.”

Nvidia Predictions: AI Infrastructure Set to Shift in 2025

Executives from Nvidia outlined their predictions for AI development in 2025

The integration of AI into enterprise operations has reached an inflection point. According to Forrester Research’s 2024 State of AI Survey, two-thirds of organisations would consider their AI initiatives successful with a return on investment of less than 50%.

This commercial momentum has created pressure on technology infrastructure. Data centres require new cooling systems, networking architectures need redesign, and enterprises face decisions about whether to build or rent AI computing capacity. These changes arrive as companies navigate the emergence of agentic AI – autonomous systems that use multiple language models and advanced data architectures.

With enterprise adoption of generative AI (Gen AI) set to generate US$1.02 trillion in revenue by 2032, according to Bloomberg Intelligence, executives from AI hardware leader Nvidia have outlined their predictions for AI development in 2025, focusing on changes to computing infrastructure, quantum advances and the emergence of autonomous systems.