Technology firms back Tokyo’s quantum leap with $100m funding

Google and IBM’s multimillion-dollar partnership with a top Japanese university to boost the country’s quantum computing capacity can develop young talent and demonstrate the continued importance of blue-sky university research, scholars say.

The University of Tokyo recently unveiled its partnership with the technology giants and the University of Chicago in developing the next-generation quantum computer. Under the deal, each university will get $100 million (£80 million), with Google and IBM contributing $50 million each over 10 years.

The announcement comes in the midst of a significant influx of funding into the field recently, said Thomas Busch, head of the quantum systems unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University.

“These numbers are massive compared to what we thought would be a lot of money for the area a few years ago, but they could appear small from a future point of view,” he said.

“University research is crucial in figuring out new use cases, especially using quantum computers for fundamental science, better algorithms and previously unexplored ideas for hardware improvements,” he said, adding that while companies “clearly do the cost-intensive engineering part very well”, their workforce is mostly postdoctoral students.

“To explore the full potential of quantum computing, blue-sky university research is still required,” he said.

Masashi Kawasaki, professor of applied physics at the University of Tokyo’s School of Engineering Quantum-Phase Electronics Centre, agreed that the funding, while substantial, was only part of the deal.

“It is of course a big amount of money compared with the usual research grant. However…this is not just money but includes special opportunities that cannot be purchased,” including access to “the best” quantum computers, he said.

A key aim of the university partnership is developing the young talent needed to boost Japan’s quantum capacity, Professor Kawasaki added.

He said it was necessary to expose “young and capable” students and researchers to quantum computers to develop a similar fluency to how they might use a smartphone.

Unlike a regular computer, which uses a chain of ones and zeros to execute commands, a quantum computer uses quantum bits, “qubits”, to solve complex calculations in a fraction of the time.

While today’s quantum machines are capable of 127 qubit calculations, the partnership aims to produce a 100,000 qubit computer, something that would be “nothing short of engineering magic”, Professor Busch believes.

But while more capacity in qubits is important, so is decreasing error rates for these computers, he added.

While the initiative is an important one for the development of quantum computing, it’s only part of the picture in Japan, which has been beefing up its capabilities in the field over the past decade, said Yuko Harayama, emeritus professor at Tohoku University and formerly director of Riken, Japan’s largest research organisation for basic and applied sciences.

Already back in 2014, when she was working in government, it made advances in the field a priority, and has since devoted significant funding to the area. The government has also created a structure for national development of quantum technology in the form of several Quantum Innovation Hubs around the nation.

Even with these efforts, Japan is playing “catch up” in its development of quantum technologies relative to other large research-producing nations, she said. But she hoped its new approach would bear fruit in coming years.

pola.lem@timeshighereducation.com