Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud division has developed its first quantum-computing chip, joining a growing roster of technology companies showing off curring-edge hardware.   

In the past two months, Google of Alphabet Inc. and Microsoft Corp. have revealed their own quantum hardware, indicating that this potent type of computing — which is presently relegated to scientific experiments — might address actual issues in the near future. Some claim that practical quantum computers, potentially facilitating progress in chemistry or health care, are more than a decade away.

Amazon Web Services' latest Ocelot chip, developed by a team at the California Institute of Technology, consists of two small silicon squares layered upon one another. The name is a play on words, referring to oscillators, which generate periodic electric signals, including in the prototype hardware Amazon developed. 

Bits, the basic units of computing, store information represented by a one or a zero. Quantum computers utilize quantum bits, known as qubits, which represent the likelihood of being a one or a zero and can exist in both states at the same time. This allows quantum computers to consider numerous possibilities at an exponentially quicker rate than a conventional computer.

Every Ocelot chip has five qubits for data storage, circuits for their stabilization, and four extra qubits for error detection on the data qubits. The firm claims its design could lower the expenses needed to construct a quantum computer and its related parts by 90 percent, in comparison to various other methods.