While ions have gained most of the attention, ColdQuanta believes that using cold, neutral atoms (and Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) effects) will end up being a much better approach that permits scaling to many thousands of qubits even while we are still in the so-called NISQ (noisy intermediate scale quantum) computing era.
DARPA seems to think there’s a fair chance that ColdQuanta is right and two weeks ago awarded the 13-year-old company a grant to “develop a scalable, cold-atom-based quantum computing hardware and software platform that can demonstrate quantum advantage on real-world problems.”