SAN FRANCISCO, May 6 (Reuters) - Cisco Systems ( CSCO ) on

Tuesday showed a prototype chip for networking quantum computers

together and said it is opening a new lab in Santa Monica,

California, to further pursue quantum computing.

The chip uses some of the same technology as current

networking chips and would help link together smaller quantum

computers into larger systems. But Cisco ( CSCO ) also believes it will

have practical applications before those computers become

mainstream, such as helping financial firms sync up the timing

of trades or helping scientists detect meteorites.

"There are a whole bunch of use cases," Vijoy Pandey, senior

vice president of Cisco's ( CSCO ) Outshift innovation incubator, told

Reuters. "You need to synchronize clocks and the timestamps on

all of these snapshots that are taking place from across the

globe."

Cisco ( CSCO ) 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 ( CSCO ) 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 ( CSCO ) 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."

Pandey emphasized that Cisco ( CSCO ) does not yet have a timeline

for when the chip will generate revenue and that the chip is

only a prototype.

"To build out that quantum network, the first building block

that you need is an entanglement chip," Pandey said. "Here's the

first building block of that."