Amazon has announced the prototype of its first-generation quantum chip, Ocelot.

In a blog post detailing the chip, Amazon said Ocelot represents the company’s first chip with cat qubit architecture, with future versions being developed to exponentially drive down logical error rates.

Cat qubits exist in two quantum states simultaneously, suppressing flip bit errors.

In the post, Amazon Web Services’ Fernando Brandão, director of applied science, and Oskar Painter, director of quantum hardware, said the chip uses superconducting quantum circuits and has bit-flip times “approaching one second in tandem with phase-flip times of 20 microseconds.”

Brandão and Painter added that Ocelot’s scalable architecture and noise-based gate allow the chip to surpass traditional qubit approaches to reducing error correction overhead and unlock the type of hardware-efficient error correction necessary for building scalable, commercially viable quantum computers.

“We believe that Ocelot's architecture, with its hardware-efficient approach to error correction, positions us well to tackle the next phase of quantum computing: learning how to scale. Using a hardware-efficient approach will allow us to more quickly and cost-effectively achieve an error-corrected quantum computer that benefits society,” the two quantum researchers state.

Amazon has published the results of its measurements on Ocelot, alongside its error correction performance in Nature.

“Ocelot represents an important step on the road to practical quantum computers, leveraging chip-scale integration of cat qubits to form a scalable, hardware-efficient architecture for quantum error correction,” Brandão and Painter wrote.

“We believe that scaling Ocelot to a full-fledged quantum computer capable of transformative societal impact would require as little as one-tenth as many resources as common approaches, helping bring closer the age of practical quantum computing.”

Amazon is the third major company in as many months to announce a quantum computing chip.

In December 2024, Google debuted its Willow quantum computing chip, claiming the processor performed a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes, which would otherwise take 1,025 years on a conventional supercomputer.

Earlier this month, Microsoft unveiled a new quantum processing unit dubbed Majorana 1, the first to be built on a topological core.

Amazon has its own quantum computing center in California, with the facility set to host the first AWS-made systems due to go live on its Braket service.

Braket is AWS’ quantum service, allowing customers to book time on quantum computers from a number of different hardware providers. It offers access to different quantum technologies, including superconducting, trapped-ion, and neutral atom devices on pay-as-you-go pricing, or customers can reserve dedicated capacity with hourly pricing and no upfront commitments.