The current international landscape of quantum computing is characterized by intense competition among major companies and countries, reflecting a global "arms race" to achieve technological leadership.

Leading companies driving breakthroughs include IBM, Google, Microsoft, Honeywell, Intel, and IonQ. IBM’s noteworthy achievement was delivering the first 1,000-qubit quantum chip in 2023, emphasizing improved precision and miniaturization over sheer qubit count.

Google demonstrated quantum supremacy in 2019 with its 54-qubit Sycamore processor, establishing a key milestone.

IonQ, specializing in trapped ion quantum systems, holds numerous patents, while Microsoft and Amazon are actively expanding their patent portfolios.

Some companies, including Rigetti Computing and D-Wave, have experienced struggles with technical and market challenges but remain engaged in R&D efforts and technology acquisitions .

On the national front, China leads with an estimated $15 billion government investment in quantum research, focusing on autonomous quantum systems like the Origin Wukong, which operates stably with over 70 qubits, marking a shift toward industrial application.

China also holds about 37% of global quantum information technology patents, slightly surpassing the US.

The United States follows with approximately $1.8 billion allocated in 2022, and the European Union at $1.2 billion, with the UK contributing £2.5 billion over ten years.

Other active players include Canada, India, Taiwan, Australia, Japan, and the UAE.

Canada supports firms like Xanadu Quantum Technologies under its National Quantum Strategy, India is launching a national quantum mission, and the UAE is building quantum infrastructure to bolster its knowledge economy .

Key lessons from international competition stress that quantum computing remains in its infancy, grappling with technical hurdles such as qubit error rates, coherence limitations, noise, and scalability.

The current international landscape of quantum computing is characterized by intense competition among major companies and countries, reflecting a global "arms race" to achieve technological leadership.

Title:

Content: Alert
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National Science Council: Promoting international cooperation in quantum technology to make Taiwan an important leader
Wu Cheng-chung, chairman of the National Science Council, said that in addition to actively laying out key technologies for quantum computers and communication, he also hopes to build a global cooperation platform to bring together researchers and industry leaders from all over the world to promote the progress of research and development and technology industrialization.
Quantum computing power has brought new opportunities for technological breakthroughs. Many countries have listed quantum technology as an important national development strategy and are competing for resources. The National Science Council (NSC) held the "Quantum Taiwan 2023" in Taipei today.
Wu Zhengzhong said that Taiwan has actively laid out key technologies for quantum computers and communication soft and hard, and cross-ministerial cooperation to form a quantum national team. However, it is difficult for a single country to have the full set of resources and expertise needed to comprehensively promote the research and development of quantum technology.
Wu Cheng-chung pointed out that the seminar is the first time that Taiwan has actively organized such an event, and it is an important milestone to build a global cooperation platform that brings together experts, researchers and industry leaders from all over the world to promote the progress of quantum research and development and industrialization through exchanges with the global quantum technology elite.
He said that as the number of countries participating in the cooperation and industry continues to increase, the forum platform will gradually be transformed into an international alliance to jointly promote the development of quantum technology.
The National Science Council said that the conference topics include superconducting quantum computers, quantum communication encryption, semiconductors and other cutting-edge fields, and multinational experts will have in-depth discussions on the future trends of quantum technology and share their research results and insights.
In addition to technical exchanges, the National Science Council pointed out that at the same time, the research team of the Quantum National Team, the Taiwan Semiconductor Center of the National Research Institute of the National Academia Sinica and the Industrial Technology Research Institute were arranged to present technical results to the international exhibition of Taiwan's latest progress in the field of quantum technology.
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Leading companies driving breakthroughs include IBM, Google, Microsoft, Honeywell, Intel, and IonQ. IBM’s noteworthy achievement was delivering the first 1,000-qubit quantum chip in 2023, emphasizing improved precision and miniaturization over sheer qubit count.

Title:

Content: 3 Quantum Computing Stocks That Could Grow Your Wealth

Advertisement

  • Quantum computing stocks offer growth potential in emerging technology.
  • IBM (IBM): Leader in quantum systems development, focusing on miniaturization and accuracy.
  • Intel (INTC): Applying transistor-based design to quantum computing with silicon spin qubits.
  • IonQ (IONQ): Developing trapped ion quantum systems with strong technological advantages.

Quantum computing stocks are working toward creating and selling quantum computers and other quantum products. These technologies are based on principles of quantum mechanics. This includes superposition and entanglement to perform operations that a classical processor cannot. These stocks provide a way to enter a field expected to transform many industries.

Thus, investing in quantum computing stocks is quite promising, considering the development of the industry. Some of the breakthroughs in quantum computing hardware include the creation of superconducting qubits and error correction software for larger quantum computers. There has been progress in increasing the qubit coherence times and combining classical and quantum computing to solve real-life problems.

Many of these quantum computing stocks trade at reasonable valuations. Now is a great time for investors to consider these options to grow their wealth. So here are three quantum computing stocks to consider.

IBM (IBM)

Source: shutterstock.com/LCV

IBM (NYSE:IBM) is one of the leading companies in the race toward quantum computing. It’s constantly pushing forward to create efficient quantum systems. The company’s delivery of the first 1,000-qubit quantum chip in 2023 proved incredible advancements are being made in this field.

What’s more, IBM’s approach has changed significantly since the company decided to focus on the miniaturization of quantum chips and their increased accuracy rather than increasing the number of qubits. While quantum computing still has a long way to go before it is practically usable, it has the potential to be used in fields such as cryptography, optimization, and simulation. This is where computing accuracy is paramount.

Thanks to its technical competence, cooperation with other industries, and conceptual approach to the development of quantum computing, IBM has the potential to lead the way forward.

Financially and technically, IBM pays a solid and growing dividend and has a low beta, making it a defensive pick in one’s portfolio.

Intel (INTC)

Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) has become one of the frontrunners in the race to build quantum computers through the application of transistor-based design and semiconductor manufacturing. Thus, by transferring the methods for creating and verifying conventional chips to silicon-based quantum computers, Intel has made a significant leap forward in its creation.

This is because the company is using silicon spin qubits, which are somewhat similar to the familiar semiconductor transistors. This allows the company to use its advanced CMOS fabrication facilities to place millions or even billions of these qubits on a single chip.

Intel’s progress in developing a 12-qubit silicon chip on a 300mm wafer with an impressive 95% yield rate proves its capacity to meet the stability standards of quantum computers. Also, Intel has perfected the cryogenic wafer probing technique. This allows it to test its quantum devices and make necessary adjustments faster.

INTC could be one of the top quantum computing stocks to consider to include an award-winning brand your portfolio.

IonQ (IONQ)

IonQ (NYSE:IONQ) is a leading developer of quantum computing systems using trapped ions. This approach could potentially enhance the reliability of its quantum computations.

IonQ has a strong technological advantage and owns 74 US-issued patents and 163 pending applications covering its quantum computing solutions. It is also engaged in the process of developing its quantum hardware for the commercial market, through which is available on the major cloud platforms and has signed several strategic partnerships,

One of the best things about IONQ is its financials are in good shape. This is more than what can be said for other companies that are exploring more experimental strategies.

As per its Q1 results, IonQ has high gross margins and increasing orders for quantum systems. The company expects to achieve net income before seeking more capital and thus prepare for long-term development. These factors make IONQ one of those quantum computing stocks to buy.

On the date of publication, Matthew Farley did not have (either directly or indirectly) any positions in the securities mentioned in this article. The opinions expressed are those of the writer, subject to the InvestorPlace.com Publishing Guidelines.

Matthew started writing coverage of the financial markets during the crypto boom of 2017 and was also a team member of several fintech startups. He then started writing about Australian and U.S. equities for various publications. His work has appeared in MarketBeat, FXStreet, Cryptoslate, Seeking Alpha, and the New Scientist magazine, among others.

Article printed from InvestorPlace Media, https://investorplace.com/2024/07/3-quantum-computing-stocks-that-could-grow-your-wealth/.

©2024 InvestorPlace Media, LLC

What are important areas in quantum research?

What countries and blocs are leading in developing quantum computing?

Google demonstrated quantum supremacy in 2019 with its 54-qubit Sycamore processor, establishing a key milestone.

Title:

Content: Buy Alert: 3 Quantum Computing Stocks Nearing Super Attractive Entry Points

Advertisement

  • These stellar quantum computing stock opportunities are poised to become massive investments over the long run.
  • IBM (IBM): Spearheading quantum computing advancements and providing a steady income stream with a 4.61% dividend yield, IBM showcases a unique mix of innovation and financial stability.
  • Defiance Quantum ETF (QTUM): Offering a diversified investment opportunity in its niche, QTUM opens the door to potential growth from industry leaders such as IonQ, Nvidia, and NXP Semiconductors.
  • Alphabet (GOOGL): Demonstrating “quantum supremacy” and posting a 40% stock gain amidst thriving advertising and cloud sectors, Alphabet investors have a lot to look forward to ahead.

In the fascinating landscape tech realm, quantum computing stock opportunities could prove to be incredibly lucrative over time. The notion of quantum computing, born over two decades ago, is now gaining solid traction on The Street. Moreover, the technology, rooted in the mysteries of quantum mechanics, aims to boost computing speeds significantly.

The advancements in quantum computing are impossible to ignore, with continuous improvements and decreasing development costs. Moreover, the sector’s convergence with cloud computing opens doors for broader accessibility among researchers and software developers.

Furthermore, as the digital economy and artificial intelligence sectors grow, global spending on cloud computing is expected to reach a whopping $1 trillion annually within the next decade. Quantum computing appears to be on the cusp of becoming a game-changer, and it might be the most opportune time to load up on affordable quantum computing stocks.

IBM (IBM)

Source: shutterstock.com/LCV

IBM (NYSE:IBM) has made considerable strides in fast-evolving quantum computing. Its pioneering advancements, accessible via cloud services, are critical to the broader cloud and cognitive software division.

IBM’s quantum computing efforts have been extraordinary, developing a unique strategy to combat quantum noise, a notable obstacle in quantum computing. By introducing and tracking the effects of additional noise, the approach could potentially bring quantum computers on par with their conventional counterparts in terms of usability.

Moreover, IBM has introduced a suite of quantum-related products. This includes Qiskit Runtime, efficient task-completion algorithms, and the yet-to-be-released Quantum-Safe, which aims to bolster users’ cybersecurity capabilities in sync with the expanding quantum technology industry.

Moreover, IBM’s attractive dividend yield of 4.61% adds another feather to its cap, providing a reliable long-term income stream supported by its powerful cash flows.

Defiance Quantum ETF (QTUM)

Source: Amin Van / Shutterstock.com

In the quantum computing realm, the Defiance Quantum ETF (NYSEARCA:QTUM) stands out as a fascinating bet for investors seeking a diversified approach to this high-potential sector. This ETF, equipped with a modest expense ratio of 0.40%, delivers exposure to some of the biggest players in quantum computing, diminishing the volatility seen with individual stocks in this emergent field.

The beauty of QTUM lies in its democratization of investment opportunities sidestepping the need for technical comprehension of quantum computing. Hence, QTUM effectively offers a gateway to potential growth spurred by a technology set for many industries. This makes it one of those quantum computing stock opportunities you can’t afford to miss.

Inside the QTUM’s basket, you’ll find leading quantum computing stocks, names such as IonQ (NYSE:IONQ) , Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA), and NXP Semiconductors (NASDAQ:NXPI), among others. These companies represent the frontiers of quantum innovation, making QTUM an enticing pick for those aiming to tap into the quantum leap.

Alphabet (GOOGL)

Source: IgorGolovniov / Shutterstock.com

Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) has effectively carved out its niche in the competitive landscape of quantum computing. Its journey began in 2006, with a breakthrough in 2019 when Alphabet demonstrated “quantum supremacy,” showcasing its quantum computer’s capacity to outperform a conventional computer.

Its quantum prodigy, Sycamore, leveraged 54 qubits to accomplish a calculation in a mere 200 seconds. However, despite concerns from the research community, Alphabet remains undeterred, persistently improving its hardware, software, and algorithms. Consequently, a next-gen Sycamore capable of computations could bog down a supercomputer for an astounding 47 years.

Moreover, in this turbulent year, Alphabet’s stock flourished with over a 40% gain, propelled by robust growth in its advertising and cloud spheres and breakthroughs in conversational AI. Indeed, Alphabet is a quantum player worth watching.

On the date of publication, Muslim Farooque did not have (either directly or indirectly) any positions in the securities mentioned in this article. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer, subject to the InvestorPlace.com Publishing Guidelines

Muslim Farooque is a keen investor and an optimist at heart. A life-long gamer and tech enthusiast, he has a particular affinity for analyzing technology stocks. Muslim holds a bachelor’s of science degree in applied accounting from Oxford Brookes University.

Article printed from InvestorPlace Media, https://investorplace.com/2023/08/buy-alert-3-quantum-computing-stocks-nearing-super-attractive-entry-points/.

©2023 InvestorPlace Media, LLC

What are important areas in quantum research?

What companies are leading in developing quantum computing?

What countries and blocs are leading in developing quantum computing?

What have been the landmark achievements in quantum computing?

Google's Sycamore quantum supremacy experiment

IonQ, specializing in trapped ion quantum systems, holds numerous patents, while Microsoft and Amazon are actively expanding their patent portfolios.

What companies are leading in developing quantum computing?

Some companies, including Rigetti Computing and D-Wave, have experienced struggles with technical and market challenges but remain engaged in R&D efforts and technology acquisitions .

Title:

Content: Quantum Computing Market was valued at nearly USD 234.06 billion by 2032

Prudour Private Limited

Updated · Mar 06, 2023

Quantum Computing Market Overview

Published Via 11Press: Quantum computing is a rapidly developing market that is revolutionizing how we approach computing and data processing. By employing principles of quantum mechanics to perform computations, quantum computers are capable of solving problems that classical computers may find impossible or impracticable to resolve.

The global quantum computing market size is forecast to reach USD 234.06 billion by 2032 from USD 10.13 billion in 2022, rising at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 36.89% during the forecast period.

At present, the quantum computing market is dominated by a few major players such as IBM, Google, Microsoft, and Honeywell. These firms are investing heavily in quantum computing research and development as well as creating quantum computing hardware and software systems.

The quantum computing market is expected to have a profound effect on industries such as healthcare, finance, logistics, and energy. Some key applications of quantum computing include drug discovery, supply chain optimization, financial modeling, and climate modeling.

Though the quantum computing market is promising, it still faces several obstacles such as high costs of hardware, a shortage of skilled experts in this area, and technical difficulties when building large-scale quantum computers. With ongoing research and development efforts, however, these problems should be overcome within the coming years, leading to even greater growth and innovation in this space.

Key Takeaways

  • The global quantum computing market size was valued at USD 234.06 billion in 2022 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of around 36.89% from 2022 to 2032.
  • Quantum computing is capable of solving problems that would be intractable or impossible for classical computers to solve.
  • The quantum computing market is dominated by a few major players, including IBM, Google, Microsoft and Honeywell.
  • The quantum computing market is expected to have a profound effect on numerous industries, such as healthcare, finance, logistics and energy.
  • Quantum computing has many important applications such as drug discovery, supply chain optimization, financial modeling and climate modeling.
  • The quantum computing market remains plagued by several obstacles, such as the high cost of quantum computing hardware, lack of qualified quantum computing experts and technical difficulties in building and running large-scale quantum computing systems.
  • Research and development are expected to overcome these obstacles within the next couple of years, propelling even greater growth and innovation in the quantum computing market.

Request For Sample Report: https://market.us/report/quantum-computing-market/request-sample/

Regional Snapshot

  • North America: North America is currently the leading market for quantum computing, with the United States playing a major role. Major companies such as IBM, Google, and Microsoft are driving this growth through their presence and investment in research and development activities related to quantum computing. This region boasts numerous key players such as IBM, Google, and Microsoft which are driving demand within this region.
  • Europe: Europe is an increasingly important market for quantum computing, with countries such as the UK, Germany, and France investing heavily in research and development. Through partnerships between quantum computing companies and other technology firms as well as the growing adoption of quantum computing across various industries, this region’s market is experiencing rapid expansion.
  • Asia Pacific: The quantum computing market in Asia Pacific is expected to experience significant growth over the coming years due to increased investments in research and development by countries like China, Japan, and South Korea. Furthermore, there have been an increasing number of collaborations between companies using quantum computing with academic institutions as well as its increasing adoption across industries like healthcare and finance – all contributing factors for market expansion within this region.
  • The Rest of the World: Countries such as Brazil, South Africa, and the UAE are expected to experience significant growth in the quantum computing market over the coming years due to increased investments in research and development efforts as well as the growing adoption of quantum computing across various industries. These factors are fueling this region’s meteoric rise in this region.

Drivers

  • Quantum Computing Gaining Adoption in Various Industries: Quantum computing is seeing an uptick in popularity across a range of industries, such as healthcare, finance, logistics, and energy – as companies seek to use their power to solve complex problems and gain an edge in competition.
  • Investments in Quantum Computing Research and Development: Governments, academic institutions, and private companies have made substantial investments in quantum computing research and development, spurring innovation and progress within the field.
  • Growing Number of Partnerships and Collaborations: There has been an uptick in partnerships and collaborations between quantum computing companies and other technology firms, as well as academic institutions and research organizations. This trend is propelling the development of new quantum computing hardware and software systems, as well as its adoption across various industries.
  • Increasing Access to Cloud-Based Quantum Computing Services: The growing availability of cloud-based quantum computing services is making it simpler for companies and researchers to utilize this cutting-edge technology, spurring adoption and innovation within the field.

Restraints

  • Limited Access to Qualified Quantum Computing Experts: Unfortunately, there is currently a shortage of highly experienced quantum computing specialists, making it challenging for companies to construct and sustain quantum computing systems.
  • Technical Challenges in Building and Maintaining Large-Scale Quantum Computing Systems: The development of large-scale quantum computing systems is still in its early stages, so there are numerous technical obstacles that must be overcome, such as noise reduction, error correction, and scalability.
  • Limited Quantum Computing Applications: Although the list of potential applications for quantum computing is growing, the number of practical ones that have been developed and implemented remains limited. This can make it challenging for companies to justify investing in quantum computing technology.
  • Regulatory Challenges: Quantum computing technology may face regulatory restrictions, particularly around data privacy and security. This could create additional obstacles to the adoption and investment in the technology.

Opportunities

  • Growing Number of Partnerships and Collaborations: The growing number of partnerships and collaborations among quantum computing companies, other technology firms, academic institutions, and research organizations is creating opportunities for the development of new quantum computing hardware and software systems as well as its adoption across various industries.
  • Advancements in Quantum Computing Hardware and Software: With the rapid progress being made in the development of quantum computing hardware and software, new opportunities will present themselves for applying this technology across various industries and fields.
  • The growing availability of cloud-based quantum computing services: Cloud-based quantum computing services are making it simpler for companies and researchers to access and utilize quantum computing technology, spurring adoption and innovation within the field.
  • Growth of Quantum Computing as a Service: As more companies and researchers embrace the potential of quantum computing, cloud-based quantum computing services are creating exciting new business opportunities for those offering these solutions.
  • Potential for Breakthroughs in Areas such as Drug Discovery, Finance, and Energy: Quantum computing holds the potential to unravel complex issues in fields like drug discovery, finance, and energy – leading to major breakthroughs and advances. This presents companies with unique opportunities for those who can develop and implement quantum computing solutions in these sectors.

Challenges

  • Technical Challenges in Constructing and Running Large Quantum Computing Systems: As quantum computing systems continue to emerge, numerous technical obstacles must be overcome such as noise reduction, error correction, and scalability. These issues make it challenging for companies to construct and run these massive quantum computers efficiently.
  • Limited Access to Qualified Quantum Computing Experts: There is currently a shortage of highly experienced quantum computing professionals, making it difficult for companies to construct and maintain quantum computing systems. This shortage could potentially restrict the growth of this industry in the coming years.
  • Quantum computing Applications: While quantum computing has many potential uses, the number of practical applications that have been created and implemented remains limited. This could make investing in quantum computing technology and research on practical applications an attractive prospect.

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Recent Developments

  • Google Claims Quantum Supremacy: In 2019, Google claimed to have achieved quantum supremacy by performing a calculation on its quantum computer that even the most powerful supercomputers would take thousands of years to complete. This was seen as an important milestone in the advancement of quantum computing technology.
  • IBM Launches Quantum Computing Program for Students: In 2020, IBM unveiled a quantum computing program specifically tailored towards students that provides them with access to IBM’s resources and tools, as well as a platform for learning and collaboration.
  • Honeywell Achieves Quantum Computer Record Performance: On March 20, 2021, Honeywell revealed its creation of a quantum computer with an astonishing quantum volume of 512. This feat marked an amazing advancement in quantum computing technology and demonstrated how rapidly progress has been made since then.
  • Amazon Web Services Announces Quantum Computing Service: On June 2021, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the launch of its own quantum computing service called Amazon Bracket. This offering gives customers access to various vendors’ hardware as well as tools and resources for developing and testing quantum algorithms.

Key Market Segments

Type

  • Hardware
  • Software
  • Services

Application

  • Defense
  • Healthcare & pharmaceuticals
  • Chemicals
  • Banking & Finance
  • Energy & power

Key Market Players

  • D-Wave Systems
  • Google
  • IBM
  • Intel
  • Microsoft
  • 1QB Information Technologies
  • Anyon Systems
  • Cambridge Quantum Computing
  • ID Quantique
  • IonQ
  • QbitLogic
  • QC Ware
  • Quantum Circuits
  • Qubitekk
  • QxBranch
  • Rigetti Computing

Nature Insights

  • Progress is being made in the development of quantum computing hardware: Despite the challenges facing large-scale quantum computing systems, progress is being made on quantum computing hardware. This includes creating quantum processors with increasingly more qubits and creating new materials suitable for use in quantum computers.
  • Quantum computing software is still in its early stages: While progress is being made with quantum computing hardware, software development for quantum computation remains at a standstill. This presents an immense challenge to the industry as developing efficient quantum algorithms is essential to realizing its full potential.
  • Collaboration is essential to the advancement of quantum computing: Collaboration between companies, academic institutions, and research organizations is essential for progress in this industry. This includes joint efforts to develop new hardware and software systems as well as collaborations that promote quantum computing across various industries.

Report Scope

Report Attribute Details
The market size value in 2022 USD 10.13 Bn
Revenue forecast by 2032 USD 234.6 Bn
Growth Rate CAGR Of 36.89%
Regions Covered North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa, and the Rest of the World
Historical Years 2017-2022
Base Year 2022
Estimated Year 2023
Short-Term Projection Year 2028
Long-Term Projected Year 2032

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FAQ.

What is quantum computing?

Quantum computing is a type of processing data using quantum mechanics. It relies on principles such as superposition, entanglement, and interference which enable quantum computers to perform calculations that would be impossible with classical computers.

What are some potential applications of quantum computing?

Quantum computing holds great promise for revolutionizing industries such as drug discovery, finance, energy, and logistics. Potential uses include creating new drugs and materials, optimizing supply chains and logistics networks, and even improving weather forecasting models with greater precision.

What are some of the challenges facing the quantum computing market?

The quantum computing market faces numerous obstacles, such as technical difficulties in building and running large-scale quantum computers, high costs associated with quantum computing hardware, a scarcity of highly qualified quantum experts, and an absence of practical applications developed and deployed.

Who are some of the major players in the quantum computing market?

Major companies operating within this space include IBM, Google, Microsoft, Honeywell, Intel, and Rigetti Computing. These firms are actively developing and commercializing quantum computing hardware and software systems.

What is the outlook for the quantum computing market?

Overall, analysts anticipate a bright future for quantum computing, with continued investment and innovation anticipated in the coming years. Though still in its early stages of development, its potential advantages are immense - leading to rapid industry growth over the coming years.

Prudour Private Limited

The team behind market.us, marketresearch.biz, market.biz and more. Our purpose is to keep our customers ahead of the game with regard to the markets. They may fluctuate up or down, but we will help you to stay ahead of the curve in these market fluctuations. Our consistent growth and ability to deliver in-depth analyses and market insight has engaged genuine market players. They have faith in us to offer the data and information they require to make balanced and decisive marketing decisions.

What companies are leading in developing quantum computing?

On the national front, China leads with an estimated $15 billion government investment in quantum research, focusing on autonomous quantum systems like the Origin Wukong, which operates stably with over 70 qubits, marking a shift toward industrial application.

Title:

Content: Chandeliers, ‘qubits’ and Schrödinger’s cat: Inside the bizarre world of quantum computing

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Explainer

Chandeliers, ‘qubits’ and Schrödinger’s cat: Inside the bizarre world of quantum computing

In the quantum realm, the laws of physics are different. Now its mind-bending tech could soon transform our lives. How does it work?

It was 2009, and a group of scientists had crowded around a tiny monitor in a Sydney physics laboratory. The team, led by electrical engineer Andrea Morello, held their collective breath and peered at a single flat line on the screen. Then, in the blink of an eye, the line changed: it was a series of blips, like a heartbeat. They’d hit paydirt. “When you see that symbol, you’re in the game,” recalls physicist Charles Tahan.

Welcome to the quantum world, a subatomic realm – yes, smaller than an atom – where the laws of physics are, well, different. The experiment made Morello and his team the first in the world to show that a quantum computer could be made using not diamonds, not the superconductor niobium, but everyday silicon. “To show you could do that, 100 different things had to go right,” says Tahan.

Quantum computing is one of the key technologies defining this century. Its proponents say it will do for computers what the car did to the horse and buggy. It will upend encryption and molecular biology. In theory, it could even possibly find cures for cancer. Australia is among the world leaders in a quantum computing gold rush, with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese saying his government is “serious about building a strong quantum ecosystem” and investing nearly a billion dollars.

Yet despite eye-watering outlays worldwide, quantum computing is still in its infancy, part of a mind-bending world that physicists are only beginning to fully grasp. What is it? And how will it make a difference to our lives?

How does a quantum computer work (and why did Alice in Wonderland have the jump on it?)

It’s often remarked that it looks like a beautiful chandelier, or a wedding cake. And IBM’s quantum computer, one of the world’s largest, is certainly an intriguing object, an intricate dome of golden wires and graceful tubes suspended from a ceiling.

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The part we can see, though, is really just the control and support system for a microchip (currently a version called Condor) buried deep inside. The glittering exoskeleton is there to keep its tiny heart as cold as possible – a hundred times colder than the coldest depths of space – and to feed information in and out, the process that makes it a “computer” and not just a science experiment.

The chip itself is smaller than a postage stamp, with several layers of circuitry and metal sandwiched in a tiny square, cooled to improve conductivity and to eliminate “noise”, the bugbear of many such devices. But even what we see here is not where the action happens. For that, we have to go deeper still, down into the chip and well beyond what’s visible through even the most powerful microscope, beyond the layers of individual atoms, into the atoms themselves.

‘The truth is the universe doesn’t run by the rules that we see every day – gravity, you bounce a ball and it falls. It runs on these other rules: quantum mechanics.’

In the subatomic realm of electrons, protons and photons, things happen very differently. Indeed, these tiny particles have no use for Newton’s laws of physics, nor even many of Einstein’s. “The truth,” says Tahan, “is the universe doesn’t run by the rules that we see every day – gravity, you bounce a ball and it falls. It runs on these other rules: quantum mechanics.”

Why these particles behave as they do in the quantum realm is a difficult concept to get your head around. Even Einstein resisted aspects of it, famously arguing that “God does not play dice with the Universe”. It was a misstep. “Because he didn’t believe in the completeness of quantum mechanics,” says Morello, “he lost a lot of productive years because he didn’t understand how it is possible that this thing is true.”

Many leading physicists investigated the concept from the early 1900s, including some familiar from popular culture today, notably Einstein and Neils Bohr (portrayed in Oppenheimer), Werner Heisenberg (whose name Walter White stole for his drug-chemist alter ego in Breaking Bad) and Viennese physicist Erwin Schrödinger, of the famous cat experiment (explained below).

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Lewis Carroll, meanwhile, may have had the jump on quantum physics with his ideas in the Alice books, as James Renner observed in The Wall Street Journal in 2015. “We speak of going down the wormhole into a mysterious world that defies Newtonian physics, where once Alice went down the rabbit hole into a mysterious world that had much the same effect. Now we speak of quantum particles being in two places at once or even Schrödinger’s cat being alive and dead at the same time, long after the Cheshire Cat’s grin was magically displaced from its body.”

The quantum realm has only truly begun to reveal itself to us relatively recently. In 1964, the Irish-born physicist John Bell published one of the most important theorems, which, according to Professor Andrew Whitaker in Physics World, “opened up the possibility of experimental philosophy, the study of what are normally thought of as philosophical issues in experiments. Not only do these experiments probe the deepest and most profound aspects of quantum theory, they also provide information on the fundamental nature of the universe.”

At the time, Bell’s theorem could not be tested in a lab. That would come in the late 1960s and early 1970s when experimentalists such as John Clauser began to show that the weirdness Bell had described on paper actually occurred in the real world. Which, at the time, was considered quite rude. One eminent physicist “was highly offended by my impertinent effort and told me that it was tantamount to professing a disbelief in quantum physics,” Clauser later recalled.

He and other apostates continued their work because he found some of the predictions “sufficiently bizarre that I could not accept them without seeing experimental proof”. Working with leftover lab equipment – “physics department scrap” – he went on to provide experimental evidence that refuted even Einstein’s theories. “I was very sad to see that my own experiment had proven Einstein wrong,” he said. Clauser would go on to win the 2022 Nobel Prize for Physics alongside Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger for their groundbreaking experiments with so-called “entangled” particles.

Quantum physicists still despair at the difficulties of explaining their weird world to outsiders. “Many writers fall back on boilerplate that makes physicists howl in agony,” wrote computer scientist Scott Aaronson in The New York Times in 2019. Unfortunately, says Gerard Milburn, a quantum physicist from the University of Queensland, “The quantum world lies beyond the reach of natural language.”

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But we’ll give it a go. Chiefly, particles in the quantum realm aren’t tied down to being in one place or state in the way bigger things are in the outside world, such as cats, which tend to be in one place at once. They obey different rules entirely. The first way to understand this oddness harks back to high-school science and how light can behave as both a particle and a wave. Photons – bursts of light – can act like ball bearings, with position and momentum. Yet light also behaves like a wave washing over a beach in a way that a ball bearing can’t. That’s a quantum physics party trick.

What is Schrödinger’s cat?

The most famous primer for quantum mechanics is the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat, a mind experiment devised by Schrödinger in 1935. A hypothetical cat goes into a box with a vial of poison gas, which has a 50-50 chance of killing it. You close the box and can’t see inside. So, without opening the box, you can’t know whether the poison has killed the cat or not. Therefore, posited Schrödinger, puss is neither dead nor alive but both – until you open the box.

In quantum mechanics, this state is called “superposition”. It’s impossible to describe properly without a background in higher-level mathematics, which we lack, but it generally means not knowing whether, say, an electron is over here, or over there, or – cat-like – in both places at the same time. Another way of looking at it is to visualise a coin spinning on its side. Until it stops and lands on one side or another, it’s not heads or tails but both.

At least, kind of.

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“Every explanation we give in lay terms is in some way wrong,” says Stephen Bartlett, a theoretical quantum physicist and director of the University of Sydney Nano Institute. “People often say a quantum superposition is in the value zero and the value one at the same time. That’s sort of right, and sort of not right.” Says Morello: “This is where language is failing us, right? If you’re trying to say that in plain English, it sounds really weird. But if you actually think about, you know, the mathematics of it, and the actual physical embodiment of that, it actually makes perfect sense.” Suffice to say, a real cat cannot find itself in “superposition”: this is a state that can exist only in the subatomic world.

How is this useful (and what’s a qubit)?

In a conventional computer, information is encoded as voltages that pass around the system thanks to millions of tiny transistors – essentially, gates or switches that turn on and off. A quantum computer is similar except that instead of using transistors as switches it uses subatomic particles, such as electrons or photons, that can have many more states than simply on or off, according to their position, momentum, spin direction and polarisation. Once harnessed – and there are many ways of doing that – these particles-as-switches are called “qubits”, a play on the word “bit”, the smallest unit of data that a computer can process and store.

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Information can be encoded on qubits in various ways: for his computers, Morello uses silicon and strong magnetic fields like those found in MRI machines. “The stuff that I build in my lab is actually a small silicon chip the size of a fingernail,” he says, “but the whole infrastructure around it is quite fancy. It’s a very powerful refrigerator that cools down the chip to [just] above absolute zero.

Critically, qubits can relate to other qubits in a state called “entanglement”. This enables quantum computers to perform multiple calculations simultaneously – which is their superpower. Schrödinger described entanglement as “the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics, the one that enforces its entire departure from classical lines of thought”. Sceptical Einstein called entanglement “spooky action at a distance”. Gerard Milburn says entanglement is great for building a computer “because if you want to have all these switches, having them strongly correlated is exactly what you want. And if you can control those correlations, you can do computation.”

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It’s these characteristics that have scientists and engineers excited. Not because quantum computers will necessarily take over from the conventional miracles we so rely on today but because they can do some particular things that transistor-based machines either struggle with or fail at completely. Today’s supercomputer might try to simulate molecular behaviour with “brute force”, says IBM’s quantum department. “But as it moves past the simplest, most straightforward molecules available, the supercomputer stalls. Quantum algorithms take a new approach to these sorts of complex problems, creating multidimensional computational spaces.”

‘Calculations that are completely impossible … would rapidly become possible on a quantum computer.’

This might include modelling how a drug might affect a virus, how new materials in aeroplanes might react to stress, or the exact process necessary to create a perfect chemical reaction.

“Calculations that are completely impossible – not just on present-day conventional computers but any conceivable future conventional computer – would rapidly become possible on a quantum computer,” says Andrew Doherty, professor of physics at Sydney University. “These are things where the application of that computer would be transformative to people’s lives without every home, you know, having a laptop quantum computer.”

Whether quantum computing will also revolutionise artificial intelligence is less certain. AI works by drawing from a huge amount of data, which is not something that naturally fits on a quantum computer, says Morello. “The problem with quantum computers in general and, in particular, with applications to AI is that loading data into them and reading data out of them is slow and cumbersome and prone to errors. It’s a bottleneck.”

Why is it so hard to build quantum machines?

Creating the qubits is hard, whatever material you start with. Interfacing with them via tiny wires like the golden lattice in IBM’s machines is hard. Getting accurate information from them is hard: “noise”, in the form of vibration or spurious electromagnetic signals, makes them behave badly and give poor results – “decoherence”, in physics speak.

Much of Andrew Doherty’s team’s work these days is in figuring out how to reduce this noise to acceptable levels and compensating for the errors that noise produces. “Compared to our conventional computers, quantum technology [computers] are very noisy devices,” he says. “They go wrong one time in 1000 as opposed to one time in an astronomically huge number of uses of [normal computers].”

Teams around the world are working on multiple approaches both to building the machines and compensating for their eccentricities, from labs in Australia to the tech giants Google, Microsoft and IBM – its Quantum Lab relies on superconducting qubits made from aluminium and niobiumand the Chinese government.

Some versions, such as IBM’s and Morello’s, chill the atoms to keep them as stable as possible. In contrast, the Australian company Quantum Brilliance is working with synthetic diamonds because they work at room temperature. “Unlike other materials,” says co-founder Marcus Doherty (no relation to Andrew), “diamond’s incredible hardness means that even at room temperature, there isn’t enough thermal energy in the environment to create vibrations that destroy the quantum properties of qubits.”

‘People are working really hard to try to find different mathematical problems that they think maybe quantum computers can’t crack.’

Another key moment in the quantum timeline came in 1994 when US mathematician Peter Shor showed that a quantum computer could crack encryption standards safeguarding everything from national intelligence systems to bank accounts. “He devised an algorithm, in theory, that he would need to run on a quantum computer,” says Bartlett. “And if you could build a quantum computer of sufficient size, then yeah, all information security falls apart.” Cybersecurity experts call that scenario Q-Day. “At the moment, people are working really hard to try to find different mathematical problems that they think maybe quantum computers can’t crack,” says Bartlett.

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In 2001, IBM made a seven-qubit device controlled through radio frequency pulses to demonstrate Shor’s Theorem. IBM’s prototype wasn’t given a huge task, managing to calculate that three times five was … wait for it ... 15. Yet this was considered a great success, even if it had shades of the famous supercomputer Deep Thought from Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which ponders the question of “life, the universe and everything” for thousands of years before giving the answer: 42.(Adams also dreamed up the Infinite Improbability Drive for a spaceship called the Heart of Gold, which used quantum theory to allow it to cross through every point in the universe simultaneously, allowing interstellar travel without all that “tedious mucking about in hyperspace”.)

Then, in 2019, Google claimed its 54-qubit Sycamore processor had performed a calculation in 200 seconds that would have taken the world’s most powerful supercomputer 10,000 years – a breakthrough some breathlessly likened to the Wright brothers’ first flight in 1903. Others were more sceptical, saying it would be many more years before quantum computers would have enough qubits – and be stable enough – to do anything actually useful. IBM said it could simulate Google’s experiment in two-and-a-half days on a “normal” computer, albeit if it had access to the Oak Ridge Summit supercomputer, a beast occupying an area the size of two basketball courts. IBM’s shimmering Eagle, meanwhile, had just 127 qubits; its successors, Osprey and now Condor, have pushed the bar to over 1000 and it plans for 1386 qubits in its Kookaburra in 2025.

Yet most of these devices are still basically proofs of concept, says Morello, the first step to manufacturing and miniaturising, as we saw with today’s transistor-based computers, which started out as rooms full of valves and cables. In the post-World War II era, says Andrew Doherty, “computers took up office floors of buildings in Manhattan and people put paper cards into them to program them. Out came numbers that even my childhood pocket calculator could have calculated right.” Many hundreds of billions of dollars have gone into developing computer technology, in packaging it for convenience and getting the components to work reliably, he says. “That whole engineering thing has got to grow up around these quantum technologies.”

Already, Marcus Doherty’s Quantum Brilliance has installed a quantum computer at the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Perth and is about to export computers, at this stage for customers to experiment with quantum computing and work out how to make it useful. In the future, finding commercial applications for a quantum computer will require tailoring it, at least initially, says UNSW’s Maja Cassidy, a former quantum researcher for Microsoft. “People have to go in and understand a company’s problem, how they’re using classical computing and … work out what section might be enhanced by the quantum computer.”

Who is leading the quantum race?

China is the only other nation giving the United States a run for its money. Its leader, Xi Jinping, put accelerating quantum technology in his 2021 five-year plan. McKinsey & Company estimates China has spent at least $15.3 billion in public funds on quantum research. That partly came to fruition in April with the Chinese Academy of Science’s unveiling of a 504-qubit chip, still half the size of IBM’s biggest.

For its part, Australia got a head start with quantum research in the 1990s. Today, two major spinoffs from UNSW research are pursuing silicon-based quantum computing: Silicon Quantum Computing (SQC), led by Professor Michelle Simmons, and Diraq, led by Professor Andrew Dzurak. SQC’s approach involves embedding phosphorus atoms within a wafer of silicon. Dzurak’s approach involves trapping electrons on silicon transistors. Both have the advantage of silicon chips already being ubiquitous. “Today, in our phones and our laptops, the silicon chips that are in those have upwards of a billion transistors on them,” says Dzurak. “The benefit of the technology that we’ve developed is that we are also able to get millions, and ultimately billions, of quantum bits onto a single silicon chip.”

‘Computers as we know them today are an absolutely mind-blowing achievement. So any technology that has the ambition of being an alternative or being better than that has a phenomenally high bar to clear.’

Other leading players in Australia include Q-CTRL, which is working on controlling and enhancing quantum hardware; quantum security company QuintessenceLabs; and Doherty’s Quantum Brilliance, which used its synthetic diamonds in the world-first integration of a two-qubit quantum device into a supercomputer at room temperature in 2022.

Meanwhile, out of the University of Queensland came early gains in “photonic” quantum computing, which harnesses particles of light – photons – as qubits. In April, the federal and Queensland governments jointly set aside $940 million in share purchases, grants and loans for PsiQuantum, a Silicon Valley company whose founders include Australian professors Jeremy O’Brien and Terry Rudolph. Unlike ions or electrons, photons are not charged, Bartlett says, so are not sent haywire by electromagnetic forces – but they are hard to manipulate and measure.

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Another approach involves “trapped ion” quantum computing, pursued by US company IonQ: physicists take an atom, flick off an electron so it is positively charged, then suspend the resulting ion within an electromagnetic field and manipulate the ion with lasers. But Bartlett says this approach will be hard to scale, given the technology to suspend millions of ion qubits doesn’t yet exist.

In April, the federal government also announced $18 million for the University of Sydney to establish Quantum Australia, a research consortium between several universities headed by Bartlett. “It used to be a small research community,” he says. “You absolutely needed to speak the common language of everyone else, which were the rules of physics. Now we are really seeing quite a bit of specialisation.”

Even if quantum computers develop practical uses, they will likely live in vast, super-cooled server farms where land and power are cheap. We’ll communicate with them through our everyday devices, much as we download and upload data from cloud servers, Netflix, TikTok, DropBox, whatever, today. The real challenge for quantum computing, says Morello, is that the alternative is “really, really good”. “Computers as we know them today are an absolutely mind-blowing achievement. So any technology that has the ambition of being an alternative or being better than that has a phenomenally high bar to clear.”

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How much have countries and blocs invested in quantum computing?

What are important areas in quantum research?

What countries and blocs are leading in developing quantum computing?

What seminal quantum computers/ processors have been developed?

China also holds about 37% of global quantum information technology patents, slightly surpassing the US.

Title:

Content: People 's Daily Online > > Economy and Technology
"Origin Goku" stable operation shows what
May 12, 2024 08: 54 | Source: Economic Daily
Small number
Original title: "The source of Goku" stable operation shows what
As of May 7, China's third-generation autonomous superconducting quantum computer "Origin Wukong" has attracted more than 8 million visits worldwide.
Previously, it was successfully connected to three supercomputing centers such as the Yangtze River Delta hub Wuhu cluster computing power public service platform, marking the formal completion of China's "four calculations in one" system of general computing, intelligent computing, supercomputing and measurement.
What does the stable operation of "Origin Goku" show?
"Genyuan Wukong" is China's third-generation autonomous superconducting quantum computer, equipped with 72-bit autonomous superconducting quantum chips.
The computer is named "Wukong", which means that it is as powerful as the traditional Chinese mythological figure Sun Wukong and can change 72 times.
"Benyuan Wukong" was independently developed by the Benyuan Quantum team and launched on January 6 this year. Since the launch of the line, the average daily global visit is about 66,700 times, and the average daily completion of nearly 1,500 computing tasks.
Quantum computing is a cutting-edge emerging technology that has great potential in artificial intelligence, biomedicine, financial analysis and other fields.
If the general purpose traditional computer is compared to a bicycle, the quantum computer is like an airplane.
To break down 300 large numbers, it takes 150,000 years to make use of a trillionth of a conventional computer, and 1 second to make use of a trillionth of a quantum computer.
The biggest advantage of quantum computers is their powerful computing power, but compared with traditional computers, the technology is immature, the manufacturing cost is high, and the reliability is not strong.
China's quantum computing technology is in the transition stage from laboratory research and development to industrial application.
"Genyuan Wukong" equipped with hardware, chips, operating systems and application software are autonomous and controllable, and the localization rate is more than 80%, which marks the basic formation of China's superconducting quantum computer industry chain.
In the four months since its launch, "Benyuan Wukong" has successfully completed more than 178,000 computing tasks for users in 120 countries, and countries with quantum computers such as the United States, Japan and Canada have shown great concern for "Benyuan Wukong", among which the frequency of visits by US users is much higher than that of other countries.
In the field of quantum computing, developed countries led by the United States have started early, developed rapidly and have a high degree of industrial maturity, and have gradually established a "quantum computing ecological chain."
For example, in 2017, IBM led the establishment of the Quantum Computing Industry Alliance (IBM Quantum Network), which has more than 250 members from the United States, Japan, South Korea, Germany, Australia and other countries, involving Fortune 500 companies, start-ups and academic institutions.
However, although China started late in the quantum field, it has made rapid progress.
A recent paper on global quantum information technology patents shows that from 2003 to 2022, China's quantum information technology patent applications accounted for 37% of the global total, surpassing the proportion of the United States slightly more than 28%.
"Origin Wukong" is the first large-scale and long-term opening of China's quantum computing power to the world, indicating that China has officially entered the "usable" era of quantum computing power.
Looking forward to the future, let the "Wukong" further play the power of the "source", it will take many efforts.
We should focus on making up for the shortcomings and strength of the weak, so that the key instruments and equipment of quantum computing can be fully replaced in China. We should support the building of the quantum chip industry chain and build a quantum computing power network. To change the situation of shortage of talents in the quantum field.
Computing power is the new quality of productivity in the digital economy era, who has mastered the advanced computing power, who has mastered the "winning chance" of development.
On the international science and technology track of quantum computers, the layout and development of independent industrial chains is an inevitable choice for us to face the forefront of world science and technology, the main battlefield of the economy, and the major needs of the country.
(Editor: Yang Xi, Chen Jian)
Public Number ： People 's Network Finance
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What countries and blocs are leading in developing quantum computing?

The United States follows with approximately $1.8 billion allocated in 2022, and the European Union at $1.2 billion, with the UK contributing £2.5 billion over ten years.

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  1. Hardware
  2. Quantum
April 25, 2023

Investment in quantum technology hit a record $2.35bn last year

Billions of dollars have been invested in quantum technology since 2001 with the majority of that investment happening since 2020.

By Ryan Morrison

Quantum technology companies attracted more than $2.35bn in private investment last year, slightly breaking the record set in 2021. A new report by McKinsey suggests this investment could be well placed, as companies deploying quantum stand to gain $1.3trn in value by 2035. To unlock this potential companies have to focus on attracting top talent and scaling up the speed and accuracy of qubits. One expert says public and private sector organisations have a role to play in solving the talent problem.

The McKinsey report suggests four industries are likely to see the earliest impact – automotive, chemicals, financial services and life sciences. This is because these areas have high compute needs and complex problems where quantum advantage is likely to come earlier.

A significant amount of investment in quantum technology is going to start-ups that came into the industry in the past two years. According to McKinsey, 68% of the money put into quantum since 2001 has been invested in the last two years

As of last year, that investment is being spread over fewer new companies. In 2021, 41 quantum technology start-ups were founded, dropping to 19 in 2022 which, according to McKinsey suggests money is going to established start-ups rather than new companies, which could be tied to difficulties in attracting new talent.

The report suggests investors are looking for companies “ready to scale”, with four of the ten largest investment deals since 2001 closed in 2022. Some of these have been worth up to $500m and seven of the ten largest deals in 2022 were worth more than $100m.

Public sector investment is also growing rapidly with the US committing $1.8bn in 2022, the UK will spend £2.5bn over a decade and the EU has $1.2bn for quantum on the table. These are all dwarfed by the estimated $15.2bn public investment in quantum announced by the Chinese government.

Another reason for the redirection of investment towards more established companies could be tied to the slowdown in major scientific breakthroughs, the report authors speculated.

Many of the early-stage quantum technology companies are formed out of university projects and in 2022 the number of published papers on quantum technology declined by 61% between 2020 and 2021. There was another decline, of about 5% between 2022 and 2021. This, they wrote, could be due to challenges becoming harder to solve.

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Need for ‘fault -olerant’ quantum machines

The next stage in quantum computing requires both a ramp-up in qubit numbers and quality to create “fault-tolerant” processors capable of solving real-world problems more accurately and faster than classical computers. The problem is that while qubit numbers have been growing steadily, the quality hasn’t kept pace.

IBM has gone from a 20-qubit processor in 2019 to announcing a 1,000+ qubit machine due for release next year, but it also has a second track of processors with better quality qubits but far fewer actual qubits on each chip.

“In each of the five main approaches to quantum computers, difficult challenges remain,” the authors wrote. This is across all the main types of qubit being developed. For example, in photonics these devices still “leak” photons which results in computation failures and high error rates. In superconducting systems like those used by IBM and Google there are issues scaling up the control and cooling systems to handle potentially thousands of qubits.

These problems have to be solved to unlock the economic value the technology holds, the report authors declared. As economic value depends on speedup, which depends on algorithm complexity, execution time and problem size.

Achieving this scale-up will require top talent and while the talent gap is “significant”, McKinsey suggests it is narrowing in quantum technologies. “Our analysis shows that nearly two-thirds of open jobs in the industry could be filled with new masters’-level graduates in 2022.”

There are still shortages though, with OECD figures showing 717 active job postings last year and 450 master's-level graduates with degrees applicable to those vacancies. This was better than in 2021 when there were 851 job vacancies and just 290 graduates.

Talent isn't evenly spread. Based on density per million inhabitants the EU and UK are top destinations for graduates in quantum technology-relevant fields with 303 per million graduating in the EU in 2020 and 217 per million in the UK.

Ekaterina Almasque, general partner at VC fund OpenOcean, told Tech Monitor the quantum industry was “in its growth phase”, making it extremely challenging to find talent with the necessary skills across a range of technologies and services. “Most individuals working in the industry today were introduced to the concept of quantum computing at a relatively late stage," Almasque says. "While this will change naturally as the industry becomes more established, the private and public sector stakeholders of quantum computing must work together to improve this.”

She adds: “From a European perspective, many pioneering quantum computing businesses are pushing to become world leaders. For Europe to properly establish and maintain a lead in quantum computing, there must be a broad, strategic initiative for early education in quantum computing.”

  • Ryan Morrison writes a new weekly newsletter, Quantum Untangled, looking at the practical applications of quantum computing and interviewing leading figures from the industry. Sign up here.

Read more: How will the UK develop quantum computer regulation?

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Other active players include Canada, India, Taiwan, Australia, Japan, and the UAE.

Title:

Content: Briefing

Moonshooters
What America’s largest technology firms are investing in

Their focus is on the metaverse, cars and health care

WHEN CORPORATE bosses want to impress investors they increasingly reach for the i-word. Mentions of “innovation” during the earnings calls of S&P500 firms have almost doubled in the past decade. And no other sector talks about it as much as the technology companies do. For Hewlett-Packard, a printer and personal-computer maker, innovation has on occasion become what location is to estate agents and education to Tony Blair: so important it has to be said three times in quick succession.

Do they protest too much? Throughout that decade some critics held that the technology sector was not delivering as much innovation as it should. When Tim Cook, the boss of Apple, said that 2020 was the firm’s “top year of innovation, ever” thanks to the release of the new iPhone, Mac and other devices and services it was possible to feel he might be going some way towards making the critics’ case for them. The things the products could do and the ease with which they did them represented a remarkable achievement. Yes, computing power kept increasing, and software kept doing more. But where were the flying cars, robot footmen and headsets through which to meld minds?

In 2020 a report by an antitrust subcommittee in America’s Congress argued that the dominance of big tech had “materially weakened innovation”. The giants, it said, accrue big benefits from the network effects which make having the most users the best way to add new users; they add to the protection such moats provide by pre-emptively acquiring potential rivals. Stamping out such “killer acquisitions” was one of the aims of President Joe Biden’s executive order on increasing competition last year.

One counter-argument to this is that competition in tech is far from dead. It is hard to find a part of the industry where two or more of the “Big Five”—Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft—are not facing off against each other. Another is that when it comes to technological innovation, competition is not necessarily the thing that matters most.

When the twin foundations of the computer age, the transistor and Claude Shannon’s theory of information, came out of Bell Labs in the mid-20th century, it was not because the labs’ owner, AT&T, was facing lots of scrappy competitors. It was because it wanted to make and own the future. Rob Atkinson, head of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think-tank, argues something similar is true today: the Big Five are “oligopolists which use their market power to win the next big thing.”

Having gone through exponential growth themselves, they are all well aware that missing the next transformative change could see them thrown out of the future-making game. To get a sense of their strategies The Economist has analysed a range of data on the Big Five’s activities, including the technology focus of the companies they have recently acquired and of those they have taken minority stakes in, their employees’ profiles on LinkedIn and their publications and patents. The work provides a sense of where this phenomenal spurt of investment is headed.

That America’s big tech companies are spending a truly vast amount on R&D is not in doubt. In 2020 America’s public and private spending on R&D added up to $713bn. In 2021 the Big Five spent $149bn, equivalent to roughly a quarter of that total (though some of that money is not spent in America). That is significantly higher than the largest single government R&D budget, that of the Pentagon.

A lot of that spending is in product development, and it is true that the tax regime encourages spending to be put down as R&D if possible, which can distort things. But that can hardly explain the 34% increase since 2019: the tax regime has been unchanged throughout that time.

Capital expenditure—which mostly goes towards data centres, but also in Amazon’s case fulfilment centres—has also grown, to $131bn a year. In the past 12 months the Big Five’s share of cashflow from operations invested in R&D and capital expenditure was 53%. That compares to a median of 32% for all S&P500 firms.

One reason for truly vast spending is truly vast companies. The revenues of the Big Five, which have a combined market value of over $9trn, almost tripled between 2015 and 2020. But though when expressed as a proportion of sales increased investment looks more modest, it is still real (see chart 1). Spending on R&D rose by a third over the same period, from about 9% of sales to 12%, and capital expenditure grew by more than a quarter, rising two percentage points to about 9% of sales.

But a crucial part of it is that there are specific goals the firms want to achieve that require a lot of R&D. Apple is on the lookout for the piece of hardware that will become the new iPhone, be it a car or virtual-reality (VR) headset. Amazon is relentlessly trying to improve the efficiency of its warehouses and delivery system and expand the range of industries making use of Amazon Web Services. For Meta, which has seen its main offering, Facebook, eschewed by younger people, a new big thing may be the only way to secure survival: its recent name change will be for naught without the new tech to back it up.

Researchers at the Big Five published over 16,000 scientific papers in the five years to 2019, and their topics provide some insights into what is going on. Core businesses are being burnished—a recent paper from Amazon discusses ways of “avoiding duplicates in the search results”—and some esoteric possibilities explored—a paper from a team with members in Google Research provides insights into a “human surgical sample from the temporal lobe of the cerebral cortex”. But different publication policies at different companies make it hard to put the data to quantitative use.

Alphabet is generous when it comes to publication, seeking to attract researchers who wouldn’t join a company which required them to hide their light under a bushel. As a result Alphabet looks good in measures based on publications: it is the fourth-highest-ranked corporate institution in the current edition of the Nature Index, which measures the impact of academic research in the sciences (Roche, a Swiss health-care firm, tops the list). Apple is much stricter about publication. But that doesn’t mean it is less innovative.

Cars, the metaverse and everything

Analysts reckon that somewhere between 5% and 20% of the tech giants’ massive R&D spending goes towards what, for the purposes of this article, we are calling “frontier technologies”: the metaverse, autonomous vehicles, health care, space, robotics, fintech, crypto and quantum computing. (Artificial intelligence, AI, is now so ubiquitous that we are not counting it as a frontier in itself.) We looked at acquisitions, investments and employment data to see which of the companies seemed most interested in what.

Over the past three years the Big Five have acquired 110-odd companies, according to data from PitchBook, a research outfit (these data do not include the $69bn acquisition of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft announced this week, which is reported on in the Business section). There is a limit to how much these data can reveal. In most cases the deal size was not made public and many smaller acquisitions are treated as recruitment and so not in the data. Believers in “killer acquisitions” may see some of these deals as attempts to hinder innovation rather than accelerate it. But even if that is the case, they show where the companies are focused.

Of the 40-odd deals that came with figures attached, the total valuation was roughly $50bn. Over a quarter of the firms acquired specialised in AI or in crunching vast data sets. Perhaps a quarter of them were developing frontier technologies (see chart 2 for a breakdown).

Microsoft is the big spender. In April it agreed to buy Nuance Communications, a health-care-focused cloud and software provider, for $19.7bn, in the largest acquisition for which we have data in the past three years. It has also bought startups which facilitate cloud services, such as Mover.io, which helps businesses shift data to the cloud, and CloudKnox, a cyber-security firm. Google, which lags behind Microsoft and Amazon in its cloud offering, snapped up three cloud-based startups, including Actifio. It also bought three wearables firms, including Fitbit, on which it spent $2.1bn, reflecting its growing interest in health care.

In terms of single-mindedness, the clearest signal is Meta’s pursuit of all things metaverse. Of the 13 firms that work in augmented reality (AR) or VR which were bought for a public price, Meta bought eight, including BigBox VR and Downpour Interactive. Apple bought another four, including Next VR and IKinema. But its highest priority by this measure was AI. Of its 22 purchases since 2019 more than half have been AI-related startups.

Another window into the priorities of four of the five companies is where they choose to take minority stakes. Of the 101 companies in which PitchBook data show the firms investing over the past three years more than a third are active in frontier technology. The exception here is Apple, which makes very few such investments, none of which have been in the frontier areas.

Here, too, the choices are revealing. Take the five investees that make cars. Amazon invested in two, Aurora and Rivian. The latter, in which it has a 20% stake, went public in November and is valued at $67bn. On top of this, last year Amazon bought Zoox, which like Aurora focuses on autonomous vehicles, for $1.3bn.

Analysts suspect Amazon’s immediate interest in the sector lies in the possibility of making its delivery service cheaper and more efficient—it has already ordered 100,000 delivery vans from Rivian. The investment may be comparable to the company’s purchase of Kiva Systems, a robotics firm, in 2012. Kiva’s technology now helps Amazon’s warehouses run smoothly.

Google also invested in two self-driving-car companies: Waymo, a firm originally spun out of X, the tech giant’s in-house “moonshot” unit; and Nuro, an autonomous-delivery company. Apple, which in 2019 acquired Drive. AI, a self-driving-car startup, is mostly working on its self-driving cars in-house. Its Project Titan aims to launch a vehicle in 2025. This week Microsoft joined the race, with an investment in Wayve, a London-based self-driving-car firm.

Overall, 9% of the investments made by the big tech companies are in cars and mobility, compared with just 2.4% for the venture-capital industry. Indeed, all of the frontier technologies except for crypto boast a share of Big Five investment higher than that for VCs in general. Overall 37% of big tech investments, by number, were on the frontiers, as opposed to around a quarter for venture investors in general.

Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft also all have separate investment subsidiaries. Since 2019 Alphabet’s venture-capital arms (Gradient Ventures and GV) and its private-equity unit (CapitalG) have cut about 400 deals. Around 100 of those have been for firms that work in life sciences or health care—an area tech firms see as appealing in part because of AI’s increasing applicability to biology. You can now “write RNA structure on a computer like it’s a piece of software,” says Tom Slater of Baillie Gifford, a large asset manager that invests in tech firms. Google’s venture-capital investments include Editas Medicine, a genome-editing company, and Adagio Therapeutics, a drug-discovery firm.

Another 45 investments from Google’s financing arms have been in fintech firms such as Botkeeper, an automated book-keeping service. Other tech firms are making similar moves. Apple acquired Mobeewave, a payments startup, in 2020 to turn iPhones into mobile contactless payment terminals. Last year Amazon bought Perpule, an Indian fintech firm, and is working with Goldman Sachs to expand the company’s loan offering.

Perpule and a number of other fintech firms are part of another trend: of the 101 firms the tech titans have taken a stake in since 2019, 24 hail from India, more than any other country except America. Amazon has built up a stake in BankBazaar, a Chennai-based online financial marketplace. In 2020 Google said it planned to invest $10bn in Indian tech firms over the next five-to-seven years. Overall big tech looks far more willing to invest in India than American VC firms are.

Another way to gauge where technology firms are placing their bets is to look at the people they employ and those whom they want to employ. The Economist examined the LinkedIn profiles of employees at the Big Five for the most-used keywords (see chart 3). Again, the data from Meta are very metaversal. We found some experience of working with AR or VR in 2-4% of the profiles associated with Meta’s employees, more than with any other firm.

Quantum of employment

According to Thinknum Alternative Data, a research firm, the tech giants are looking to hire in these areas too. Among the Big Five job listings mentioning AR or VR jumped from about 75 in August 2020 to 567 today. Meta and Amazon are posting about 200 such jobs each at the moment—a striking fact given that Amazon employs 20 times as many people as Meta does. A similar uptick can be seen in car-related listings. Some hires are high-profile. In June Apple hired Ulrich Kranz, formerly a senior executive at BMW’s electric-vehicle unit, to beef up Project Titan. It has also snapped up two executives from Tesla.

There is growing interest in quantum computing, if from a low base. On average around 0.5% of staff at Big Tech firms refer to quantum on their LinkedIn pages. Amazon and Alphabet are mentioning it more when advertising vacancies. In July Google announced a big step in quantum error suppression, vital if the technology is to be commercialised. Kevin Scott, chief technology officer at Microsoft, sees investment in quantum computing as a necessity for the company. “If such a [quantum-computing] machine were to exist in the future it would be important that Microsoft has one,” he says. Such fears of missing out can drive huge research projects.

Other forms of data support much of what our research suggests. Take patents. Microsoft, Amazon and Google have all recently applied for quantum-computing-related patents. More than half of Meta’s patent applications since 2019 mention AR or VR. On earnings calls Meta, unsurprisingly, bangs on about the metaverse; Microsoft and Google are much more likely to talk about the AI which will underpin most of the new tech frontiers.

None of this is to say that Mr Atkinson’s oligopolists are investing in a way likely to maximise innovation itself, let alone the economic and social benefits it can bring. It is hard not to believe that the sheer size of these incumbents constitutes some sort of block on radical attempts to reinvent the world. But though each company has its particular interests, our picture of their priorities shows that in many sectors there really is significant competition.

And for all that innovation is an easy word to throw about, throwing huge amounts of money and resources at it is much harder. Far better that big tech should do that hard work than just sit on its backside maximising its rents.

This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline "Big tech’s private passions"

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Canada supports firms like Xanadu Quantum Technologies under its National Quantum Strategy, India is launching a national quantum mission, and the UAE is building quantum infrastructure to bolster its knowledge economy .

Title:

Content: There were 1,711 press releases posted in the last 24 hours and 342,181 in the last 365 days.

Supporting Canada's leadership in quantum computing to grow the economy and create jobs

TORONTO, Jan. 23, 2023 /CNW/ - Quantum technologies are at the leading edge of science and innovation. As Canadian researchers, workers and businesses continue to demonstrate leadership on the world stage in innovating and developing quantum technologies, we have the potential to transform how we work and live in Canada and around the world – in areas from fighting climate change to making advancements in health care. The Government of Canada will continue to support Canadian companies to help them keep growing and staying competitive, while driving economic growth and creating highly skilled and well-paying jobs for Canadians.

The Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, today announced a new federal investment of $40 million to enable the Toronto-based Canadian quantum computing company Xanadu Quantum Technologies Inc. to build and commercialize the world's first photonic-based, fault-tolerant quantum computer. Once developed, this computer will have the potential to provide world leading capabilities to help solve complex data problems and could be used in a variety of sectors such as finance, transportation, environmental modelling, and health.

Supported through the government's Strategic Innovation Fund, this $177.8 million project is expected to create 530 new highly skilled positions in the high-tech and quantum computing fields.

Home to some of the world's largest quantum tech hubs, Canada is well positioned to become a global leader in the developing quantum sector, which will create new opportunities for Canadians and Canadian businesses. The Government of Canada will continue to invest in innovative companies to grow the economy and create highly skilled and well-paying jobs for Canadians.

Quotes

"Quantum technology is changing the world as we know it. With the potential to solve difficult problems in key areas such as health care, finance, and climate sciences, this sector expands the realm of possibility. Today's announcement is great news for Canadian workers and businesses. This investment will bring good jobs, spur economic growth, boost innovation, and solidify Canada as a world leader in quantum technology."

— The Rt. Hon. Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada

"Quantum technologies will set the course of the future and thanks to companies like Xanadu, Canada is at the forefront ready to lead. With today's announcement, our government is strengthening Canada's position in quantum technology and helping to create more economic growth and good jobs for Canadians. We'll continue to build this sector through our National Quantum Strategy and support made-in-Canada technology so Canada remains a world leader for decades to come."

— The Hon. François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry

"The government's continued investment in quantum technologies has been invaluable to our success. We are proud to be a Canadian company and, with this investment, are excited to enter the next phase in our mission to build quantum computers that are useful and available to people everywhere."

— Christian Weedbrook, Founder and CEO, Xanadu

Quick Facts

  • Since the birth of quantum science more than 100 years ago, quantum technologies have been the source of many game-changing innovations such as semiconductors and the laser.
  • Quantum science is the study, manipulation, and control of systems at the atomic and subatomic level.
  • It is estimated that by 2045, the Canadian quantum industry will be a $139 billion industry, including all economic effects, and account for over 200,000 jobs, according to a study commissioned by the National Research Council in 2020.
  • Earlier this month, the Government of Canada launched its National Quantum Strategy, which invests an additional $360 million to help solidify Canada as a global leader in quantum technologies.
  • Over the past 10 years, the Government of Canada has invested more than $1 billion in quantum research and science.
  • Additionally, the government has invested in bringing new quantum technologies to the Canadian and global markets, including investments through Canada's regional development agencies, the Strategic Innovation Fund, and the National Research Council of Canada's Industrial Research Assistance Program.
  • Xanadu is a notable contributor to Canada's innovation ecosystem and has committed to continuing to support innovation, growth, and Canada's research and development sector.
  • Founded in 2016, Xanadu is a Toronto-based Canadian quantum computing company with the mission to build quantum computers that are useful and available to people everywhere. Xanadu has become one of the world's leading quantum hardware and software companies and leads the development of PennyLane, an open-source software library for quantum computing and application development.

Associated Links

This document is also available at https://pm.gc.ca

SOURCE Prime Minister's Office

View original content: http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/January2023/23/c3179.html

Key lessons from international competition stress that quantum computing remains in its infancy, grappling with technical hurdles such as qubit error rates, coherence limitations, noise, and scalability.

What are the challenges in quantum computing research?