Google’s parent company Alphabet is planning to spin out one of its quantum computing moonshots.

Alphabet is reported to be preparing to spin out Sandbox ( mostly known as Sandbox@Alphabet). In fact, Sandbox is closely tied to Alphabet’s skunkworks X unit, it is reportedly separate from that business.

Sandbox is a separate unit from Google’s quantum computing team. It is led by Jack Hidary and focuses on software and experimental quantum projects.

Hidary signed a California regulatory filing for a company called SB Technologies, Inc. which will do business in this state and is based in San Francisco.

Wired first detailed the existence of a second quantum computing team within Alphabet in 2020.

A VentureBeat report suggests the company is looking at how to use classical hardware designed for machine learning & artificial intelligence – such as Google’s tensor processing units (TPUs) – to simulate quantum computing workloads using a set of new APIs called Floq.

In fact, Google has been working on quantum computers for years, building Bristlecone and other quantum chips. In 2019, it claimed quantum supremacy.

Google last year opened a quantum computer data center and R&D lab in Santa Barbara, aiming to build a commercial-grade 1-million-qubit quantum computer by 2029.