IBM How does the CHIPS Act drive the U.S. quantum industry

What impact will the newly signed Chip and Science Act (CHIPS) have on the U.S. quantum industry? Recently, Dr. Dario Gil, Senior Vice President and Head of Research at IBM, and Paul Dabbar, former Under Secretary for Science at the U.S. Department of Energy and CEO of Bohr Quantum Technologies, expressed their views on The Hill, a leading U.S. current affairs website.

Left: Dario Gil; Right: Paul Dabbar

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Much of the attention surrounding the recent Chip and Science Act has focused on the semiconductor industry, and rightly so: The bill makes a historic down payment on chip manufacturing and innovation that will help strengthen supply chains and national security and restore America's competitiveness and economic leadership in the future.

But the Chip and Science Act also authorizes significant investments to accelerate other emerging technologies, such as quantum computing, which can help solve some of the world's most complex problems faster and more efficiently than standard computers, and is critical to U.S. national security.

As the fourth anniversary of the National Quantum Initiative (NQI) approaches, we are witnessing how government-funded projects can greatly accelerate the promise of quantum technology: an "industry of the future"; but there is more work to be done: we must continue to build on the progress made by the NQI and leverage the new investments in the Chip and Science Act to greatly expand support and development for quantum technologies.

With strong bipartisan support, NQI passed in 2018 with several significant increases in support of quantum goals, including $1.25 billion in federal support to the Department of Energy (DOE), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for quantum research.

The DOE authorized several new national quantum research centers, with the key being the co-participation of private quantum companies. For NSF, it has authorized several new university research and teaching programs in quantum technologies. nIST has established a broad industry consortium, the Quantum Economic Development Consortium (QED-C), to help drive new commercial prospects for quantum technologies.

NQI also aims to urge other sectors in the U.S. to invest in quantum technologies, including universities and the private sector. Finally, it has established a federal coordination effort through the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Over the past several years, all three agencies have received full grants and have implemented them as directed. At DOE, more than 70 units are now part of the five National Quantum Research Centers, including laboratories, universities and many private companies, such as IBM and Goldman Sachs. This effort has also triggered significant other industry and academic investments outside of federal NQI funding. As a result, significant technical achievements have been made by industry, national laboratories and others, and many universities have expanded their degree programs in quantum technologies.

Everyone involved in drafting, passing, funding, and implementing NQI should be proud of what it has accomplished.

The past three months have seen progress in new federal quantum efforts. in May, a coalition of federal agencies announced a plan to build the world's first metropolitan quantum network in Washington, D.C., connecting agency locations, including the Naval Research Laboratory, NIST, NASA and the National Security Agency (NSA). In the future, other parts of the country could join in building regional quantum networks that could eventually connect to each other.

But we can't stop there. The recently passed Chip and Science Act authorizes new efforts to advance quantum technology and provides new opportunities to double down on our progress.

For the Department of Energy, it creates two new efforts: The QUEST program will enable the DOE to procure quantum computing capacity through the cloud for use by scientific researchers. This five-year, $166 million procurement, amounting to $33.2 million per year, is a good basis for providing quantum computing capabilities to researchers and helping to nurture a user community for quantum computing applications. The second DOE effort is to authorize $500 million over five years to build large-scale quantum network infrastructure across the country. The Chip and Science Act also increases quantum technology support for the National Science Foundation. The largest increase is likely to come from NSF's New Technology and Innovation Directorate, and quantum computing is one of the future industries supported by additional NSF funding.

To take advantage of this progress and the U.S. focus on new economies such as innovation, Congress must fully appropriate the first year of funding in fiscal year 2023. But more needs to be done to accelerate the development of quantum computing and its applications (including in quantum networks).

Now is the time to design and build a new type of supercomputer for the United States - a quantum-centric supercomputer. These new national assets will tightly integrate classical computing, including traditional high-performance computers and specialized artificial intelligence chips, with quantum processors in a new type of architecture.

Quantum-centric supercomputers have the potential to scale and accelerate workflows by combining quantum and classical algorithms using parallelization of computation. These workflows have far-reaching implications for scientific, commercial and national security missions. DOE has a rich history of making this level of investment in the nation's high performance computing centers. It is time to evolve this level of initiative into a quantum-centric supercomputing center with missions across the United States.

Computing and communication networks are mutually reinforcing, and this will be true in the quantum era as well. Future quantum networks will be built by clusters of quantum processors, as well as quantum supercomputers and data centers at their nodes, with short-range intranet links connecting the processors in the nodes and long-range quantum communication links connecting the nodes, similar to a quantum Internet.

The NQI and investments under the Chip and Science Act and the QUEST program give the U.S. an important jumping off point. For the quantum industry to fully develop, it will need to continue to increase the level of investment in high-impact initiatives with the national goals described above.

U.S. leadership puts us at the forefront of quantum technology. But that leadership is fragile. New efforts to build quantum supercomputers and the quantum Internet will accelerate that leadership and pay dividends for decades to come. We must keep our foot in the door and continue to make the necessary investments for a vibrant quantum future for all.

Reference link：

https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/3640416-how-the-chips-act-supercharged-the-us-quantum-industry/