Axios Reports on the international quantum race

(Axios) The first country to produce effective, working quantum computers will have a key advantage in economics, defense and cybersecurity — and the U.S., China, and Europe are all competing. Bryan Walsh of Axios Future is reporting on “. .the major emerging trends shaping the coming decades”; IQT-News summarizes his discussion on the international quantum race.

Last month, the Commerce Department added a dozen Chinese companies to a trade blacklist in an effort to prevent emerging U.S. technologies from being used for quantum computing efforts that would boost Beijing’s military.

• • It was the latest move in a tech trade war between Washington and Beijing that has national security implications, and one that is increasingly spilling over into the realm of quantum computing.
  • It was the latest move in a tech trade war between Washington and Beijing that has national security implications, and one that is increasingly spilling over into the realm of quantum computing.
  • “The United States is quite a ways ahead in many areas [of quantum] and we have a lot of talent,” says Laura Thomas, a former CIA case officer and the director of national security solutions for ColdQuanta.

Between the lines: While U.S. companies generally have the lead on building better quantum computers, China has invested massively in the industry, including an $11 billion national laboratory for quantum information sciences.

Chinese researchers have made breakthroughs on quantum communications, including via satellite, and Chinese companies dominate patent applications for quantum cryptography.
But in part because Chinese researchers don’t publish as often as their Western counterparts — and because travel in and out of the country has been highly limited during COVID-19 — “we don’t have a lot of visibility into what they’re doing,” says Peter Chapman, president and CEO of quantum computer company IonQ.

What to watch: Progress on American efforts to develop post-quantum cryptography standards that would resist more powerful quantum computers, as well as research from the five new quantum institutes created by the White House last year.