What’s next for China’s digital currency?

MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of our series here.

China’s digital yuan was seemingly born out of a desire to centralize a payment system dominated by the tech companies Alibaba and Tencent. According to its central bank, the digital currency, also known as the e-CNY, is both a risk-free alternative to these commercial platforms and a replacement for physical cash, which is becoming obsolete. 

Almost three years into the pilot, though, it seems the government is still struggling to find compelling applications for it, and adoption has been minimal. Now the goal may be shifting, or at least broadening. China appears to be charging ahead with plans to use the e-CNY outside its borders, for international trade. 

If it’s successful, it could challenge the US dollar’s position as the world’s dominant reserve currency—and in the process shake up the global geopolitical order.  

The (public) rationale

From the outside looking in, it is impossible to fully ascertain the government’s plans for the e-CNY. Though the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) has not been shy about its central bank digital currency (CBDC) project, it has revealed few specific details about how the e-CNY actually works—or how it ultimately intends to use it.

One thing we do know is that it’s been a long time in the making. 

While Alibaba and Tencent launched their digital payment systems in 2004 and 2005 respectively, China began researching digital currency technology in 2014 and launched a research institute devoted to the concept in 2016, hoping to create a centralized alternative. Then in 2019, after Meta (then called Facebook) proposed its own global digital currency, PBOC officials expressed concern that the coin, called Libra, might undermine the monetary sovereignty of China’s currency, the yuan. The next year it started the e-CNY pilot phase, which is still ongoing.

According to Mu Changchun, director general of the PBOC’s Digital Currency Institute, the e-CNY project has three main goals: to improve the efficiency of the central bank’s payment system, provide a backup for the retail payment system, and “enhance financial inclusion.”

“Now we can provide 24/7 services to the general public,” he said during a talk he gave via Zoom for an event hosted last year by the Atlantic Council, a foreign policy think tank in Washington, DC. Mu added that the e-CNY will broaden access to the PBOC’s payment system—extending it to, among others, more private-sector firms, including fintech companies and telecom operators.

Mu said e-CNY will also serve as a necessary backup to the popular mobile payment apps Alipay and WeChat Pay, which dominate China’s daily retail transactions. Most people in China don’t use cash or credit cards but rely on their phones to buy things, so these commercial platforms have become “significantly important financial infrastructure,” Mu said. If something ever goes wrong with them, “that will bring a very significant negative impact to the financial stability of China,” he said.

On top of that, between 10% and 20% of people in China don’t have bank accounts and can’t access the commercial financial system, said Mu. Visitors to China from other countries also often have difficulty participating in the mobile-dominated payment system, where many vendors no longer take cash or even cards. They could use e-CNY instead, according to Mu. 

It’s possible to access e-CNY through commercial bank apps, but it’s also possible through an app run by the PBOC. The PBOC’s choice to connect directly with retail customers through its app is remarkable, because central banks typically deal only with other banks.

“Managed anonymity”

China is at the forefront of an increasingly global push to adopt CBDCs. More than 100 countries around the world are exploring possible CBDC designs, and a big question they are wrestling with is how directly the central bank should be involved versus letting the currency be run by private-sector intermediaries. For example, to prevent money laundering and other financial crimes, traditional banks require users to verify their identities. Most central banks don’t want to have to do this kind of admin for millions of people, says Ananya Kumar, an associate director for digital currency research at the Atlantic Council.

But the PBOC’s desire to do just that explains why some civil liberties activists oppose the idea of CBDCs. Around the world, retail transactions are going cashless, and if cash becomes obsolete, governments will use CBDCs as tools for surveillance and control, argues Alex Gladstein, chief strategy officer at the Human Rights Foundation. 

“The Chinese government wants more control over payments,” says Gladstein. Though it already has a firm grip on the two commercial payment giants, direct control and oversight over a digital currency would provide much better data and the power to deny people access, he says. 

The PBOC, on the other hand, says the e-CNY will protect people’s privacy thanks to a policy that it calls “managed anonymity.” In short, it’s possible to get an e-CNY account using only a mobile number. Balances for these accounts are capped. In his talk last year, Mu said the cap was 10,000 yuan (around $1,400 at the time of this writing) and that users of such software wallets can spend up to 2,000 yuan per transaction and 5,000 yuan per day. 

Mu dismissed the idea that the government could determine users’ real identities from the mobile numbers. China’s new Personal Information Protection Law will prevent telecom operators from sharing identifying information with the central bank or other e-CNY operators, he said.

One particularly advanced feature of e-CNY is the ability to transfer money between two people using devices that are not connected to the internet. During the Atlantic Council talk, Mu showed a video of people using this offline payment function with smartphones as well as plastic cards with e-ink displays.

Feeling around for a fit

But why should people adopt the e-CNY? It seems the government is still trying to figure that out. The PBOC has been piloting the currency for almost three years, testing a wide variety of potential uses. 

Kumar and her colleagues have documented 30 different test applications, ranging from bank loans to cards that combine e-CNY wallets with other functions. Examples include an “elderly care card,” which integrates health-care information and location data with an emergency service system; a “smart student ID”; and a card that pays e-CNY rewards for using low-carbon transportation. There are also several pilots focused on online commerce in rural areas. And in April, Changshu, a city of 1.5 million people, said it would start paying public employees in e-CNY.

“All kinds of little nooks and crannies of the payment system are getting reached by e-CNY,” says Darrell Duffie, a professor of finance at Stanford’s graduate school of business. 

Still, hardly anyone is using it. Though the system has been tested in 25 cities, and 260 million unique wallets hold a total of 13.61 billion RMB ($1.9 billion), last year e-CNY accounted for only 0.13% of the supply of central bank reserves and cash in circulation. “That’s very small after two years of piloting,” says Duffie. He says the only reason it’s still called a pilot is that it hasn’t taken off.

Officials have said there is no set timetable for the formal launch of the e-CNY, and that the bank is focused on improving the user experience and testing the security and resilience of the network rather than increasing adoption. But some close observers think the government underestimated how hard it would be to create a retail payment network from scratch.

“A lot of the ambition for this project has proven more difficult to achieve than they thought, and the timeline has been longer than people anticipated,” says Martin Chorzempa, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for Economics, a think tank in DC. What’s been especially difficult, he says, has been signing up enough merchants and creating a rich enough “ecosystem” to make the e-CNY as useful as established payment methods. 

“The e-CNY has to be as useful as Alipay and WeChat Pay for it to actually have a user base, and right now there really is not a use case,” says Chorzempa, who has written a book about China’s payment system. “People just get a red envelope, they spend it, and they generally don’t open the e-CNY app again,” he says, referring to the electronic icon the government uses when it doles out digital money to pilot participants. Chorzempa speculates that the challenges the PBOC has had in getting traction for the e-CNY inside China may be contributing to its increased focus on international uses. 

And that has put the e-CNY on a collision course with the US dollar.

e-CNY vs. USD

Though the government may be struggling to find compelling applications in China, it may have found one elsewhere, in the form of large cross-border payments between banks. The international payment system, which consists of a network of so-called correspondent banks, can be cumbersome and slow. CBDCs could be faster and more efficient.

For China, there could also be a geopolitical upside: an alternative set of international payment rails that the United States does not control.

Because the dollar is the world’s dominant reserve currency, a country that wants to do business with others typically needs dollars. That means the US can effectively expel an adversary from the global financial system. For example, when Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, the US, with help from its allies, imposed sanctions on Russia’s biggest banks that targeted assets and barred them from US-controlled global financial infrastructure, hampering their ability to raise capital.

This geopolitical advantage could be undermined if currencies like the Chinese yuan become more prevalent in global trade, a process that the e-CNY could accelerate. That’s why an e-CNY pilot called Project mBridge is important, says Chorzempa.

The project is a test of infrastructure for a “wholesale” CBDC led by China, which would be used for large-value cross-border transfers between banks, says Chorzempa. “That’s really where you get into actual potential competition with the US dollar,” he says. 

Today, banks typically execute such transactions using what’s called the correspondent banking system. A correspondent bank is a third party that serves as an intermediary between domestic banks in different countries. 

According to the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), however, this system “has not kept pace” with the “rapid growth in global economic integration” that has occurred in recent decades. Correspondent banks duplicate processes and steps, making cross-border payments costly, slow, and operationally complex—with “limited access and low transparency,” according to the BIS. Researchers at the BIS believe that a CBDC-based system could make this system more efficient and cheaper.

That’s part of the BIS’s rationale for working with the PBOC—along with the central banks of Hong Kong, the United Arab Emirates, and Thailand—on Project mBridge. Over the course of six weeks last August and September, 20 commercial banks used a custom blockchain to settle $22 million in cross-border transactions using CBDCs. 

That’s only a “drop in the bucket,” acknowledges the Atlantic Council’s Kumar. Still, it’s important because it’s the first time multiple jurisdictions have settled CBDC transactions, she says: “Not can, not potential—have actually done it.” It’s also a big deal in the context of the ongoing global discussion about “de-dollarization” and the internationalization of other currencies, says Kumar. 

Given the “weaponization of the dollar” via sanctions, China and other countries are trying to develop new ways to settle trades, she says. For example, in April, Bangladesh used yuan to pay off a loan from Russian lenders, using an interbank payment system that China developed called the Cross-border Interbank Payment System, or CIPS. “It did that partly because a) its dollar reserves aren’t very high and b) it wants to actually transact with Russia,” says Kumar. Sanctioned Russian banks are blocked from using the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), the platform that facilitates most wholesale cross-border transactions.

In Kumar’s view, however, mBridge is about more than currency: “The more important part there is about the technology that is getting internationalized and used by other countries because there’s a geopolitical motivation for them to do that.” She has hypothesized that what might emerge if China is successful is “a set of technical and regulatory standards built in the image of the e-CNY.” 

It’s likely no coincidence that the US Federal Reserve is now researching CBDC systems for large-value cross-border transactions too. Last November, the New York Fed released results from the first phase of what it calls Project Cedar: “a multiphase research effort to develop a technical framework for a theoretical wholesale central bank digital currency.” In May, it published results from Phase II, a collaboration with Singapore’s central bank. According to the New York Fed, the project demonstrated that distributed ledger technology could support “enhancements to multi-currency payments and settlements.”

It will be “a long, long time” before the e-CNY might become a geopolitical problem for the US, says Stanford’s Duffie, not only because the technology is complicated but also because the legal and governance issues for cross-border payments are so complex.

Chorzempa agrees that it would take a long time for the e-CNY to significantly disrupt the dollar’s power, if it ever happens. China is betting that many other countries will adopt “tokenized” central bank payment systems, he says, but it’s still not clear if the technology offers advantages over conventional payment systems. Nevertheless, he says, “I would not write it off.”

What’s next for the moon

MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of our series here.

We’re going back to the moon. And back. And back. And back again.

It’s been more than 50 years since humans last walked on the lunar surface, but starting this year, an array of missions from private companies and national space agencies plan to take us back, sending everything from small robotic probes to full-fledged human landers.

The ultimate goal? Getting humans living and working on the moon, and then using it as a way station for possible later missions into deep space.

Here’s what’s next for the moon.

Robotic missions are leading the charge

More than a dozen robotic vehicles are scheduled to land on the moon in the 2020s.

On July 14, India launched its Chandrayaan-3 mission, a second attempt from the country to land on the surface of the moon after Chandrayaan-2 crashed there in 2019. That landing attempt will come in August. 

Hot on its heels are two private companies in the US, Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines, both partly funded by NASA to begin moon landings this year. Astrobotic’s Peregrine One lander is scheduled  to carry a suite of instruments (some from NASA) to the moon’s northern hemisphere later this year to study the surface, including a sensor to hunt for water ice and a small rover to explore. And Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lander will attempt a lunar first.

“Our primary objective is to land softly on the south pole region of the moon, which has never been done before,” said Steve Altemus, the company’s CEO, after NASA recently asked the company to change the original planned landing site. The mission will include a telescope to image the Milky Way’s center from the moon, another first, and some demonstration lunar data centers. The launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is provisionally set for September.

Both companies have bigger ambitions. In 2024, Astrobotic hopes to send a NASA rover called VIPER to drive into some of the moon’s permanently shadowed craters and hunt for water ice. Intuitive Machines’ second mission, meanwhile, will deploy a small hopping vehicle that will jump into one of these pitch-black craters and carry a drill for NASA.

“There’s quite a lot of excitement around that,” says Xavier Orr, the CEO of the Australian firm Advanced Navigation, which will provide the landing navigation system for Nova-C and the hopper. The craters, he adds, are thought to be “the most likely places of finding ice on the moon.”

These private companies are backed by millions of dollars in government money, driven by NASA’s desire to return humans to the moon as part of its Artemis program. NASA wants to expand commercial moon activity in the same way it has helped fund commercial activity in Earth orbit with companies such as SpaceX.

“The goal is we return to the moon, open up a lunar economy, and continue exploring to Mars,” says Nujoud Merancy, chief of NASA’s Exploration Mission Planning Office at the Johnson Space Center in Texa. The ultimate plan, Merancy says, is to foster a “permanent settlement on the moon.”

Not all are convinced, especially when it comes to how companies will make money on lunar missions outside of funding from NASA. “What is the GDP of lunar activities?” says Sinead O’Sullivan, a former senior researcher at Harvard Business School’s Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness. “Some commercial economy may evolve, but it’s kind of hard to tell.”

 Humans are going back, too

In November 2024, if all goes to plan, the Artemis II mission will send a crew of four astronauts—three American and one Canadian—around the moon on a 10-day mission in NASA’s Orion spacecraft, launched by the agency’s mighty new Space Launch System rocket.

Humans have not traveled to the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. The goal, however, is “not just returning, but staying and exploring,” says Merancy. Artemis II “is really ensuring that the vehicles are ready for longer-duration missions in the future.”

Also in November 2024, a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket is scheduled to carry the first modules of NASA’s new space station near the moon, called the Lunar Gateway. Gateway is meant to support Artemis missions to the moon, although the exact relationship is still somewhat murky.  The first humans back on the moon are due to land in 2025, aboard a SpaceX Starship vehicle as part of Artemis III.

Much work remains to be done, however, not least proving Starship can launch from Earth (following a botched test flight in April 2023) and be refueled in space. This leaves some in doubt of the 2025 time frame. “A landing in 2029 would be really optimistic,” says Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts.

NASA, meanwhile, has contracted both SpaceX and more recently Jeff Bezos’s competing Blue Origin for its planned landings at the moon’s south pole to prospect for water ice, which can be used both as drinking water and maybe as rocket fuel so that the moon could become a staging point for missions to more distant destinations in the solar system, such as Mars.

But the goal “isn’t just Mars,” says Teasel Muir-Harmony, a curator at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. “It’s learning how to live and work in deep space and creating a sustained presence further than Earth orbit.”

Moon laws need updating

International laws will need to be updated to cope with this uptick in lunar activity. At the moment, such activities are largely governed by the Outer Space Treaty, signed in 1967, but many of its particulars are vague.

“We are getting into areas like private space platforms and lunar mining facilities, for which there really is no clear government precedent,” says Scott Pace, a space policy expert at George Washington University and former executive secretary of the National Space Council in the US. “We have to be responsible for activities in space.”

Chris Johnson, space law advisor for the Secure World Foundation in the US, expects to see discussions at the United Nations over the next five or so years to iron out some of the issues. “We’re going to need norms for radio quiet zones, lunar roadways between valleys and craters, and landing pads on the moon,” he says. Or perhaps if emergencies break out with astronauts from different countries on the moon, “everyone has to take shelter at the nearest shelter, whether it’s yours or another’s,” he says.

NASA has begun tentative steps toward this goal, getting countries to sign up to its Artemis Accords, a set of guidelines about lunar activities. But they are not legally binding. “We only have a set of principles,” says Johnson.

Lunar missions could come thick and fast while these discussions take place, potentially moving us into a new dawn of space travel. “With the International Space Station, we learned how to live and work in low Earth orbit,” says Muir-Harmony. “Now there’s this opportunity to learn how to do that on another celestial body, and then travel to Mars—and perhaps other locations.”

What’s next for quantum computing

This story is a part of MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series, where we look across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future

In 2023, progress in quantum computing will be defined less by big hardware announcements than by researchers consolidating years of hard work, getting chips to talk to one another, and shifting away from trying to make do with noise as the field gets ever more international in scope.

For years, quantum computing’s news cycle was dominated by headlines about record-setting systems. Researchers at Google and IBM have had spats over who achieved what—and whether it was worth the effort. But the time for arguing over who’s got the biggest processor seems to have passed: firms are heads-down and preparing for life in the real world. Suddenly, everyone is behaving like grown-ups.

As if to emphasize how much researchers want to get off the hype train, IBM is expected to announce a processor in 2023 that bucks the trend of putting ever more quantum bits, or “qubits,” into play. Qubits, the processing units of quantum computers, can be built from a variety of technologies, including superconducting circuitry, trapped ions, and photons, the quantum particles of light. 

IBM has long pursued superconducting qubits, and over the years the company has been making steady progress in increasing the number it can pack on a chip. In 2021, for example, IBM unveiled one with a record-breaking 127 of them. In November, it debuted  its 433-qubit Osprey processor, and the company aims to release a 1,121-qubit processor called Condor in 2023. 

But this year IBM is also expected to debut its Heron processor, which will have just 133 qubits. It might look like a backwards step, but as the company is keen to point out, Heron’s qubits will be of the highest quality. And, crucially, each chip will be able to connect directly to other Heron processors, heralding a shift from single quantum computing chips toward “modular” quantum computers built from multiple processors connected together—a move that is expected to help quantum computers scale up significantly. 

Heron is a signal of larger shifts in the quantum computing industry. Thanks to some recent breakthroughs, aggressive roadmapping, and high levels of funding, we may see general-purpose quantum computers earlier than many would have anticipated just a few years ago, some experts suggest. “Overall, things are certainly progressing at a rapid pace,” says Michele Mosca, deputy director of the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo. 

Here are a few areas where experts expect to see progress.

Stringing quantum computers together

IBM’s Heron project is just a first step into the world of modular quantum computing. The chips will be connected with conventional electronics, so they will not be able to maintain the “quantumness” of information as it moves from processor to processor. But the hope is that such chips, ultimately linked together with quantum-friendly fiber-optic or microwave connections, will open the path toward distributed, large-scale quantum computers with as many as a million connected qubits. That may be how many are needed to run useful, error-corrected quantum algorithms. “We need technologies that scale both in size and in cost, so modularity is key,” says Jerry Chow, director at IBM Quantum Hardware System Development.

Other companies are beginning similar experiments. “Connecting stuff together is suddenly a big theme,” says Peter Shadbolt, chief scientific officer of PsiQuantum, which uses photons as its qubits. PsiQuantum is putting the finishing touches on a silicon-based modular chip. Shadbolt says the last piece it requires—an extremely fast, low-loss optical switch—will be fully demonstrated by the end of 2023. “That gives us a feature-complete chip,” he says. Then warehouse-scale construction can begin: “We’ll take all of the silicon chips that we’re making and assemble them together in what is going to be a building-scale, high-performance computer-like system.” 

The desire to shuttle qubits among processors means that a somewhat neglected quantum technology will come to the fore now, according to Jack Hidary, CEO of SandboxAQ, a quantum technology company that was spun out of Alphabet last year. Quantum communications, where coherent qubits are transferred over distances as large as hundreds of kilometers, will be an essential part of the quantum computing story in 2023, he says.

“The only pathway to scale quantum computing is to create modules of a few thousand qubits and start linking them to get coherent linkage,” Hidary told MIT Technology Review. “That could be in the same room, but it could also be across campus, or across cities. We know the power of distributed computing from the classical world, but for quantum, we have to have coherent links: either a fiber-optic network with quantum repeaters, or some fiber that goes to a ground station and a satellite network.”

Many of these communication components have been demonstrated in recent years. In 2017, for example, China’s Micius satellite showed that coherent quantum communications could be accomplished between nodes separated by 1,200 kilometers. And in March 2022, an international group of academic and industrial researchers demonstrated a quantum repeater that effectively relayed quantum information over 600 kilometers of fiber optics. 

Taking on the noise

At the same time that the industry is linking up qubits, it is also moving away from an idea that came into vogue in the last five years—that chips with just a few hundred qubits might be able to do useful computing, even though noise easily disrupts their operations. 

This notion, called “noisy intermediate-scale quantum” (NISQ), would have been a way to see some short-term benefits from quantum computing, potentially years before reaching the ideal of large-scale quantum computers with many hundreds of thousands of qubits devoted to correcting errors. But optimism about NISQ seems to be fading. “The hope was that these computers could be used well before you did any error correction, but the emphasis is shifting away from that,” says Joe Fitzsimons, CEO of Singapore-based Horizon Quantum Computing.

Some companies are taking aim at the classic form of error correction, using some qubits to correct errors in others. Last year, both Google Quantum AI and Quantinuum, a new company formed by Honeywell and Cambridge Quantum Computing, issued papers demonstrating that qubits can be assembled into error-correcting ensembles that outperform the underlying physical qubits.

Other teams are trying to see if they can find a way to make quantum computers “fault tolerant” without as much overhead. IBM, for example, has been exploring characterizing the error-inducing noise in its machines and then programming in a way to subtract it (similar to what noise-canceling headphones do). It’s far from a perfect system—the algorithm works from a prediction of the noise that is likely to occur, not what actually shows up. But it does a decent job, Chow says: “We can build an error-correcting code, with a much lower resource cost, that makes error correction approachable in the near term.”

Maryland-based IonQ, which is building trapped-ion quantum computers, is doing something similar. “The majority of our errors are imposed by us as we poke at the ions and run programs,” says Chris Monroe, chief scientist at IonQ. “That noise is knowable, and different types of mitigation have allowed us to really push our numbers.”

Getting serious about software

For all the hardware progress, many researchers feel that more attention needs to be given to programming. “Our toolbox is definitely limited, compared to what we need to have 10 years down the road,” says Michal Stechly of Zapata Computing, a quantum software company based in Boston. 

The way code runs on a cloud-accessible quantum computer is generally “circuit-based,” which means the data is put through a specific, predefined series of quantum operations before a final quantum measurement is made, giving the output. That’s problematic for algorithm designers, Fitzsimons says. Conventional programming routines tend to involve looping some steps until a desired output is reached, and then moving into another subroutine. In circuit-based quantum computing, getting an output generally ends the computation: there is no option for going round again.

Horizon Quantum Computing is one of the companies that have been building programming tools to allow these flexible computation routines. “That gets you to a different regime in terms of the kinds of things you’re able to run, and we’ll start rolling out early access in the coming year,” Fitzsimons says.

Helsinki-based Algorithmiq is also innovating in the programming space. “We need nonstandard frameworks to program current quantum devices,” says CEO Sabrina Maniscalco. Algorithmiq’s newly launched drug discovery platform, Aurora, combines the results of a quantum computation with classical algorithms. Such “hybrid” quantum computing is a growing area, and it’s widely acknowledged as the way the field is likely to function in the long term. The company says it expects to achieve a useful quantum advantage—a demonstration that a quantum system can outperform a classical computer on real-world, relevant calculations—in 2023. 

Competition around the world

Change is likely coming on the policy front as well. Government representatives including Alan Estevez, US undersecretary of commerce for industry and security, have hinted that trade restrictions surrounding quantum technologies are coming. 

Tony Uttley, COO of Quantinuum, says that he is in active dialogue with the US government about making sure this doesn’t adversely affect what is still a young industry. “About 80% of our system is components or subsystems that we buy from outside the US,” he says. “Putting a control on them doesn’t help, and we don’t want to put ourselves at a disadvantage when competing with other companies in other countries around the world.”

And there are plenty of competitors. Last year, the Chinese search company Baidu opened access to a 10-superconducting-qubit processor that it hopes will help researchers make forays into applying quantum computing to fields such as materials design and pharmaceutical development. The company says it has recently completed the design of a 36-qubit superconducting quantum chip. “Baidu will continue to make breakthroughs in integrating quantum software and hardware and facilitate the industrialization of quantum computing,” a spokesman for the company told MIT Technology Review. The tech giant Alibaba also has researchers working on quantum computing with superconducting qubits.

In Japan, Fujitsu is working with the Riken research institute to offer companies access to the country’s first home-grown quantum computer in the fiscal year starting April 2023. It will have 64 superconducting qubits. “The initial focus will be on applications for materials development, drug discovery, and finance,” says Shintaro Sato, head of the quantum laboratory at Fujitsu Research.

Not everyone is following the well-trodden superconducting path, however. In 2020, the Indian government pledged to spend 80 billion rupees ($1.12 billion when the announcement was made) on quantum technologies. A good chunk will go to photonics technologies—for satellite-based quantum communications, and for innovative “qudit” photonics computing.

Qudits expand the data encoding scope of qubits—they offer three, four, or more dimensions, as opposed to just the traditional binary 0 and 1, without necessarily increasing the scope for errors to arise. “This is the kind of work that will allow us to create a niche, rather than competing with what has already been going on for several decades elsewhere,” says Urbasi Sinha, who heads the quantum information and computing laboratory at the Raman Research Institute in Bangalore, India.

Though things are getting serious and internationally competitive, quantum technology remains largely collaborative—for now. “The nice thing about this field is that competition is fierce, but we all recognize that it’s necessary,” Monroe says. “We don’t have a zero-sum-game mentality: there are different technologies out there, at different levels of maturity, and we all play together right now. At some point there’s going to be some kind of consolidation, but not yet.”

Michael Brooks is a freelance science journalist based in the UK.