New Warnings Over China’s Efforts in Quantum Computing

(USNews) The United States should be concerned about China’s ability to pour “enormous resources” into developing powerful supercomputers, the head of quantum computing at Google warns.
Just days after officials in China announced the completion of building in a single week a new hospital for patients infected with the coronavirus and begin building a second one, Google engineering director Hartmut Neven warned that the Asian giant’s ability to quickly devote massive resources to a single task poses a new technological challenge to the U.S. and other countries.
China does not have facilities equivalent to the U.S. laboratories researching and testing quantum computers – but they will get there, Neven adds. “They plan to have three different labs and they will actually all be devoted to quantum information (the science at the core of building quantum computers).”
According to Neven, the U.S. is still the leader in quantum-computing research but, as is the custom in Silicon Valley, companies are constantly worried about competitors and watching closely any developments overseas.
“In Silicon Valley, we say only the paranoid survive, so there’s always a hit list of your biggest worries,” he says.