BCBusiness

JULY/AUGUST 2019 BCBUSINESS 17 ADAM BLASBERG F ujitsu Intelligence Tech- noloy (FIT) operates from a modest space in downtown Vancouver's Marine Building that masks the com- pany's global reach and world- changing ambitions. Four engineers study •at screens on one side of the room, too busy for the moment to mind the Ping-Pong table or eat the snacks laid out on the small kitchen island behind them. You can stand in one spot for the whole o‚ce tour on this April afternoon, but these are early days. The venture opened its doors last November, prom- ising to revolutionize the †elds of arti†cial intelligence and quantum-inspired computing. Fewer than 20 people work in this room, but FIT is wholly owned by Fujitsu, a Japanese tech giant with 140,000 em- ployees working with custom- ers in more than 100 countries. "We look like a startup, but we're not," says FIT's CEO, Naoko Yoshizawa. Indeed, Fujitsu is the largest IT services provider in Japan by revenue and the seventh- largest on the planet, with a workforce surpassing Micro- soft's 131,000. Fujitsu invested $6 million to establish FIT as its global AI headquarters. It aims to expand its head count to 200 by next year, after moving to a larger home nearby at One Bentall Centre. Fujitsu's arrival in B.C. fol- lows splashier ones in recent years by other technoloy multinationals like Microsoft, Amazon.com and SAP. But Fujitsu is staking a particularly sizable chunk of its future on its Vancouver operations. It's restructuring its global busi- ness, using FIT as a springboard and model. And it's develop- ing innovations here that aim to change the very nature of how people use technoloy for problem-solving. Canadian consumers might know Fujitsu for its laptops or the point-of-sale machines it provides to retailers like Lululemon Athletica. But FIT is pursuing enterprise customers with two potentially transfor- mative technologies: AI, and a novel class of processors called digital annealers. The latter can achieve quantum-like computational abilities to solve Local Intelligence From a small Vancouver oce, Fujitsu is laying the groundwork for its worldwide AI and quantum computing business. Why did the Japanese tech titan choose B.C.? by Dee Hon T E C H NOL O G Y ( the informer ) O N T H E R ADA R QUANTUM LEAP Classical computers process information as binary digits, or bits. Data is encoded as ones or zeros by billions of microscopic on-off switches inside a chip. But quantum computers use quan- tum bits, or qubits. Harnessing subatomic particles' ability to exist in more than one state simultaneously, they can store far more information than just a one or a zero. Vancouver's 1QB INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES 1QBIT creates software to get the most out of different quantum technologies being developed by lead- ing hardware companies Burnaby-based DWAVE SYSTEMS produces the world's first commer- cially available quantum computers, although their architecture makes them suitable only for certain types of problems FUTURE PLANS Naoko Yoshizawa leads Fujitsu's new outpost B.C. COMPANIES ON THE CUTTING EDGE OF QUANTUM COMPUTING TECHNOLOGY: 2 S O U R C E S : 1Q B I N F O R M AT I O N T E C H N O L O G I E S; " P H Y S - I C S : Q U A N T U M C O M P U T E R Q U E S T," N AT U R E , 2 0 14

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