The Pentagon Invests $350M in Quantum Computing

Strap in, nerds. Everything really is computer. 

Yesterday, the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering (OUSW(R&E)) announced a total of $350M in awards and programs to “strengthen U.S. leadership in quantum computing capabilities that support national security.”

• That includes a $150M capital loan commitment to PsiQuantum to “enhance the company’s advanced manufacturing and prototyping capabilities in the United States.”
• The remaining $200M is going to DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI) to advance four companies—Atom Computing, Diraq, IBM, and IonQ—to stage C of the program. (That’s DARPA’s effort to see if anyone, like, can actually build a quantum computer.)

With these awards, the Pentagon also says it will push the Department’s “innovation ecosystem” toward finding “mission-relevant” applications for quantum computing and these quantum computers. 

• The bet is that quantum tech will drive leaps and bounds in fields such as chemistry, materials science, and physics, which, in turn, will “enable the development of next-generation weapons, platforms, and other critical capabilities that are more lethal, cost-effective, and manufacturable.”

Bits and pieces: Now, for those of us who pretend to understand what the whole quantum thing is but actually don’t, here’s a bit of a refresher: Quantum computing is basically regular computing on steroids, using the weird and wacky laws of quantum physics to solve problems that would take even the world’s most powerful supercomputers an absurdly long time to crack.