Quantum Computing: A UK moon shot or £670m research indulgence?

Among the questions raised during the inaugural Quantum Datacentre Alliance forum held at Battersea power station in London, was one from a delegate from the government’s Quantum testbed programme, asking about the £670m of funding that has been allocated to quantum computing in Labour’s Industrial Strategy.

The package of funding aims to accelerate the UK’s quantum computing capabilities, and includes 10-years of funding for the National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC).

The implications of the question raised at the forum is that the vast majority of the £670m in funding will be spent on procuring a technology that is still very much something for boffins and people in lab coats. The NQCC is buying this technology, but there appears to be a huge amount of industry hype around what quantum computing may or may not be able to deliver. “Are you doing enough to grow up commercially,” he asked.

While the hype suggests that there is plenty of progress being made, and just a few days ago Google announced it would take a machine with “just one million qubits “ to break the RSA encryption standard, as Owen Arnold, vice president of product development of Oxford Quantum Circuits points out, the messaging across the industry suggests that making a quantum computer is a lot easier than it really is.

“There’s a lot of new science being developed that you just can’t shortcut. We’re going to have to deal with challenges,” he said. It is rather like when in 1962, president John F Kennedy challenged the US to land a man on the Moon.

But while the success of the moon shot that led to success with the Apollo 11 mission, shows the ingenuity of humanity to collaborate on what may have seemed impossible back in 1962, it was something that could be tackled with engineering. For Arnold, developing a commercially viable quantum computing is harder than a moon shot because fundamental physics is being researched alongside the work to build something useful.

Arnold was one of the members of a panel at the QDA forum, discussing the development of quantum computers in the datacentre. Alongside the work to tackle error-correction, which appears to be the biggest barrier preventing the industry moving beyond small-scale quantum processors, even after the current technical limitations are overcome, getting the tech to work is only a starting point.

Commercial reality means having a device that offers “five-nines” availability and is secure by design. Commercialisation also implies that there is a secure supply chain of the specialist components needed to manufacture and install the machines at scale. One can only hope that the millions in taxpayers’ money funding the UK’s quantum computing ambitions, is being put to good use.