The race is on for supremacy in quantum computing

Yet it is up against the world’s biggest tech companies, including Microsoft, IBM and Google, which are all jostling for position amid the race for supremacy in quantum computing, an approach to calculation that uses principles of fundamental physics to solve extremely complex problems very quickly.

Governments are getting in on the act too. Last week the UK government announced a £121 million investment in quantum technology to help tackle fraud and prevent money laundering. Among the myriad other potential applications, the technology holds out the prospect of an acceleration in drug discovery, better batteries and more accurate financial modelling.

Analysis by the consultancy McKinsey has estimated that quantum computing technology could create $1.3 trillion in value by 2035. So who are likely to emerge as the winners in the fast-developing field, and when?

This year marks a century since the discovery of quantum mechanics which helped people understand that the laws of physics governing the world around us at its smallest level — molecules, atoms and subatomic particles — are fundamentally different from those governing the way we interact with objects in our everyday lives.

Yet it wasn’t until 1981 that the physicist Richard Feynman observed that if we really wanted a computer to efficiently simulate all of the natural world, humanity would probably have to build a quantum computer.

In simple terms, quantum computing harnesses subatomic particles called quantum bits or qubits. While traditional computers rely on binary bits (zeros and ones) to store and process data, quantum computers can encode even more data at once using qubits in so-called superposition, the state in which a quantum particle or system can represent not just one possibility, but a combination of multiple possibilities.

Charina Chou at Google expects real world progress in about five years

SAMANTHA BURKARDT/GETTY IMAGES

Charina Chou, chief operating officer at Google Quantum AI, told The Times: “It can solve problems impossible for [current] computers and AI because it speaks the quantum language rather than using zero and one. All chemical reactions in life are quantum mechanics.”

The emerging field paves the way for problems to be solved at almost unimaginable speeds — provided the challenges can be overcome. Chief among those is controlling a qubit, which is extremely fast and prone to errors. Nonetheless, Chou is optimistic about real world progress in five years or so, adding: “Let’s get this engine to unlock applications.”

In December last year, Google unveiled its quantum chip Willow. The culmination of more than a decade of scientific advances, it can perform a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years to do — longer than the age of the universe. It was hailed as a breakthrough because it can reduce errors while it scales up using more qubits.

In a blog earlier this month, the company pointed to some possible advances arising from its work: by calculating how certain drug candidates will interact with their targets and other biological molecules, quantum computers may help us design more effective treatments and advance medicine; they will be able to accurately simulate lithium nickel oxide, a material used in batteries, and even more efficiently simulate the mechanisms needed for sustained fusion reactions, which could ultimately help make fusion energy a reality.

Google added: “This sort of progress in medicine and energy would be a big leap, and yet it may only scratch the surface of what could be possible with quantum computing. Given the complexity of this technology, it could solve questions we don’t even yet know how to ask.”

Not to be outdone, Microsoft recently unveiled its Majorana 1 chip, a development which showed that quantum computing is “years, not decades away”. The chip is designed to scale to a million qubits on a single chip. Jason Zander, who leads Microsoft’s strategic missions and technologies division, said it gives the company the “potential to put a million qubits in the palm of your hand”. This number of qubits is required for real-life applications. While admitting that the science is still “in transition”, Zander said: “I think we’re in the lead in the near term on logical qubits and that we can do real stuff within the next two to three years.”

In November 2024, IBM announced its 156-qubit processor, known as Heron R2, which is capable of completing workloads that previously took more than 120 hours in less than two and a half hours.

Google says that no one company can develop the technology alone

ALAMY

IBM is focused on working towards building a large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum supercomputer by 2029. That will involve working with others. Jerry Chow, director of quantum systems and runtime technology at IBM, said: “We are not slicing this whole cake up ourselves.”

However, Ballance at Oxford Ionics believes that big tech is “feeling quite threatened” by start-ups such as his. “It has started to put out these big punchy publicity announcements to try and position themselves as the inevitable winner. But if you actually look at the technological developments the different companies have across the world, then most of the innovation is in start-ups and not the big companies right now.”

The processing chip at the heart of his Quartet computer sits on a standard semiconductor fab and deploys electronic fields rather than the lasers used by other machines to manipulate electrons. The number of specialist parts used in the computer has been reduced to aid “manufacturability” according to Ballance.

Oxford Ionics has benefited from the UK’s National Quantum Technologies Programme, which was a £1 billion government-backed initiative. Ballance said: “It helped my research go from being a few people in a shed doing things through to accelerating the research at the point we can start commercialising it.”

Yet he believes the UK is now at a crossroads where it needs “large supplies of capital and conviction” to scale up commercial organisations and that countries such as Germany and the US are “better at backing national champions”.

“The UK had an early start but it has taken its eye off the ball over the last few years,” he said.

Companies need to prepare for the sea change coming in computing according to Alexia Pedersen of O’Reilly, the tech learning platform. She said: “The UK government’s £2.5 billion commitment to the National Quantum Technologies Programme has reinforced its ambition to become a global leader in quantum innovation by 2033. Realising these ambitions, however, requires organisations, particularly those in cybersecurity and financial services, to foster the skills necessary to pioneer advancements and attract world-class talent.

Google has developed a new quantum chip called Willow, which significantly reduces errors as it scales up

GOOGLE

“Building these capabilities now will ensure British organisations have a competitive advantage in the quantum era.”

Ballance believes it is only a matter of time before numerous multibillion-dollar companies are formed out of quantum technology but he still thinks it will be at least about 15 years until the technology is used for some potential applications such as breaking bitcoin security and cracking encryptions.

Despite its recent breakthroughs, Google is under no illusion as to the challenges ahead. It has said: “Realising the full potential of quantum computing requires progress across the entire stack, including building and scaling better qubits; improving quantum error correction; developing new quantum algorithms and applying them to the real world. No one can do this alone, so we’ll continue working with partners in academia, industry and the public sector to create the most advanced quantum computing system in the world.”