President Donald Trump signed two executive orders on Monday aimed at accelerating the development of cold fusion: quantum computing. One of these orders focuses on technological acceleration, and the other on risk mitigation, should the first be successful.
According to the first order, the federal government should work with private industry and academia to “usher in the era of quantum-enabled scientific discovery” – building a quantum computer that can conduct scientific research, in other words.
The second order (which actually came first chronologically) is called “Protecting the Nation against Advanced Cryptographic Attacks”, and is intended to bring federal cybersecurity into the post-quantum computing era, and “assist critical infrastructure owners and operators in their transitions.”
In 2018, Trump signed a bill called the “National Quantum Initiative Act”, which had the same purpose as Monday’s first order, and which also included funding for relevant research. Then last year, representatives of companies like Google, which conduct AI research, went to the House of Representatives to urge more funding. Relevant funding had ended.
A bipartisan bill was introduced in January that, if passed, would save a total of $128 million per year for relevant research.
But the Commerce Department did not wait for Congress to pass that bill. Last month, it announced a “letter of intent” through the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to provide a total of $2.013 billion in funding through the Chips and Science Act to nine companies. top intended The recipients will be IBM, which will receive $1 billion for “a new quantum foundry subsidiary for quantum-grade superconducting wafers”, and another, wafer company GlobalFoundries, will receive $375 million.
Quantum computers exist, in a manner of speaking. But some experts still doubt that the dream of a quantum computer that can perform complex calculations at a level of complexity that allows a millennium’s worth of mathematical calculations to be completed in hours or days – and do so precisely – will ever come true.
Google, for its part, said in March that it thinks some inaccurate (or “noisy”) quantum computers will be formidable cryptography machines before we have the pristine and perfect quantum computers long imagined.
So these executive orders are a kind of policy framework for the use of the money, which will likely soon be distributed by NIST to the private sector to advance clear US quantum computing leadership and increase cryptographic security standards.
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