Cisco Systems launches prototype chip for networking quantum computers together and says it is opening a new lab in Santa Monica, California, to further pursue quantum computing.

The chip employs similar technology to that of existing networking chips and would assist in connecting smaller quantum computers into more extensive systems. However, Cisco also thinks it will find useful applications before those computers are widely adopted, like assisting financial companies in synchronizing trade timings or aiding scientists in identifying meteorites.

Vijoy Pandey, senior vice president of Cisco's Outshift innovation incubator says, "There are a whole bunch of use cases. You need to synchronize clocks and the timestamps on all of these snapshots that are taking place from across the globe."

Cisco is the latest mainstream tech firm to jump into quantum computing. Alphabet's Google, Microsoft and Amazon have all announced quantum computing chips in recent months, and Nvidia plans to open its own quantum computing lab. Startups such as PsiQuantum are also raising hundreds of millions of dollars to build systems.

While those firms all vie to create more and more "qubits" - the fundamental unit of quantum computers - Cisco is working to link them up. The company says its chip, which it developed with researchers from the University of California Santa Barbara, works by causing quantum entanglement in pairs of photons, and then sending one of the pair to two separate quantum computers.

For a short time, Cisco says, the quantum computers can use those entangled photons to communicate instantaneously, no matter how far apart they are - a phenomenon of quantum physics that Albert Einstein referred to as spooky action at a distance.

Vijoy emphasized that Cisco does not yet have a timeline for when the chip will generate revenue and that the chip is only a prototype.

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"The first building block you need is an entanglement chip to build out that quantum network. Here's the first building block of that," adds Vijoy.