US teams up with Japan in race against China for quantum tech superiority

TOKYO – US President Donald Trump continues to keep Japan guessing about the extent of the tariffs he intends to levy on the security ally.

A much-touted meeting between Mr Trump and Nippon Steel executives over the latter’s “heavy investment” in faded American industrial icon US Steel – rather than a buyout as was intended – has not yet materialised.

Dark clouds continue to gather amid the uncertainties of bilateral trade and business ties despite the first summit between Japan’s Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba and Mr Trump on Feb 7. But one bright spot has emerged.

The US and Japan are making headway in quantum technology development, with the backing of SoftBank chief executive Masayoshi Son, who attended Mr Trump’s inauguration and has pledged to invest US$100 billion (S$135 billion) in US projects over four years.

Quantum technology was highlighted as a key priority area at the Feb 7 summit, with a joint statement pledging that Japan and the US will “strengthen their industrial bases and collaborate to lead the world in developing critical technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing and leading-edge semiconductors”.

This was with the ultimate goal to “chart an unwavering course for strengthening economic ties and elevating the economic partnership to the next level”, the statement added.

Quantum technology may be esoteric, but has potential applications across industries as diverse as pharmaceuticals, logistics, finance and even defence. The shift from conventional computers – including high-performing machines such as supercomputers – to quantum computers has been likened to mankind’s move from analogue to digital.

It comes as no surprise that quantum is thus an increasingly critical battleground for technological supremacy in the US-China superpower competition and is regarded as a highly sensitive industry.

Observers believe China holds the lead in quantum communications, which include areas such as ultra-secure cryptography and data protection. But the US is superior in quantum computing – superfast and super-smart machines that have the potential to perform, in mere minutes, calculations that would take the world’s brainiest supercomputers billions of years to solve.

China is, however, fast catching up, despite the US having imposed export curbs on quantum-related technology to the country.

“China has amassed a good deal of talent and invested generously in quantum computing,” Dr Kiyoteru Tsutsui of Stanford University told The Straits Times. “The US is doing the same, but might need to expand its efforts if it wants to keep its edge over China in this field.”

Quantum ‘friend-shoring’

It is against the backdrop of intensifying competition that the US is turning to Japan for comradeship in quantum development. Quantinuum, a US start-up that is said to possess the world’s highest-performance quantum computer hardware, has announced two agreements with Japan since Mr Trump took office.

SoftBank and Quantinuum are working together to “unlock innovative quantum computing solutions that will overcome the limitations of classical AI and realise next-generation technologies”, the companies said in a statement on Jan 29, adding that they will “use the Japanese market as a foothold to conduct global market research in the Asia-Pacific and other regions, and explore specific business models based on that research”.

Mr Ryuji Wakikawa, who heads SoftBank’s Research Institute of Advanced Technology, said: “We aim to be the first in the world to identify problems that can be solved only by quantum computers and look forward to significantly accelerating the practical application of quantum computing.”

On Feb 12, Quantinuum and Japan’s publicly funded Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (Riken) powered up a rare fully operational “hybrid” quantum-supercomputer system, which leverages the strengths and overcomes the weaknesses of the two different types of machines.

The “hybrid” system combines Quantinuum’s Reimei (“dawn” in Japanese) quantum computer with Riken’s Fugaku (another name for Mount Fuji, Japan’s highest peak) supercomputer that one global tally ranks as the world’s most powerful, and is installed on Riken’s campus in Wako, on the outskirts of Tokyo.

“US-headquartered Quantinuum linking up with Japan’s Riken is representative of the powerful link between the nations,” Quantinuum director of communications Aaron Sorenson told ST.

He added: “Since scientists are still pinpointing where quantum offers the biggest advantages, hybrid systems help fast-track those discoveries while making the best use of both technologies.”

The basic unit in quantum computers is a “qubit”, or quantum bit, unlike conventional computers, which are built on binary bits that comprise zeros and ones. A “byte” consists of eight bits.

Quantum computers, which use physical traits of particles like photons or ions, can vastly outperform traditional computers because qubits can be in different arrangements all at once. Yet they remain error-prone and unstable, given their sensitivity to the external environment and factors such as heat or electric fields. Increasing the number of qubits also raises the risk of interference, which is another source of error.

A common workaround has been to house quantum computers inside a vacuum and cool them to extremely low temperatures using so-called cryostat refrigerators, although this, in turn, causes scalability issues.

The golden ticket of quantum supremacy has given rise to a flurry of announcements in recent weeks – both from the US, where innovation is driven by private sector tech giants, and from China, where there is massive state backing.

On Dec 9, Google unveiled its 105-qubit chip dubbed Willow, which the firm’s Quantum AI leader, Mr Hartmut Neven, said “can reduce errors exponentially as we scale up using more qubits”.

“This cracks a key challenge in quantum error correction that the field has pursued for almost 30 years,” he said, adding that Willow performed a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes what today’s fastest supercomputers would take “10 septillion years (one septillion is 10 to the power of 24) to solve”.

On Feb 19, Microsoft declared a breakthrough in “topological qubits” – a way of storing quantum information that has better noise protection and is easier to build at scale – with its eight-qubit chip Majorana 1, although Microsoft said it “can scale to a million qubits”.

And on Feb 27, Amazon Web Services debuted its nine-qubit Ocelot chip that the company said can slash the costs of implementing quantum error correction by up to 90 per cent.

China, meanwhile, has published more quantum-related research papers annually than any other country since 2022.

On Dec 5, Chinese scientists unveiled the Tianyan-504 with a 504-qubit chip that, while paling in comparison with IBM’s Condor with 1,121 qubits, is being made available to the global public through the Tianyan (“celestial eye” in Chinese) quantum computing cloud platform. The Chinese Academy of Sciences said that since Tianyan’s debut in November 2023, the platform has drawn more than 12 million visits from users of over 50 countries.

This was followed by the Zuchongzhi 3.0 quantum computer announced on Dec 16, with developers saying it was comparable with Google’s Willow.

Dr Tsutsui said that rather than going it alone, the idea of friend-shoring in quantum computing could yield greater benefits for the US, given Japan’s strengths in manufacturing high-end hardware and materials.

“It will be a long race, and many things could happen,” he said. “But leveraging Japan’s potential and working with Japanese companies and researchers could give the US an edge over China in quantum computing.”