President Donald Trump signed two executive orders Monday aimed at speeding up the development of the cold fusion of computers: quantum computing. One of the orders focused on technological acceleration, and the other focused on risk mitigation should the first one succeed.
According to the first order, the federal government must team up with private industry and academia to “initiate the era of quantum-enabled scientific discovery”—to build a quantum computer that can perform scientific research, in other words.
The second order (which actually came first, chronologically) is called “Securing the Nation Against Advanced Cryptographic Attacks,” and it’s meant to bring federal cybersecurity into the post-quantum computing era, and “assist critical infrastructure owners and operators with their transitions.”
Way back in 2018, Trump signed a bill into law called the “National Quantum Initiative Act,” whose aims were similar to the first order from Monday, and which also included money for the relevant research. Then last year, representatives from companies like Google, who perform AI research, went to the House of Representatives to urge, well, more money. The relevant funding had lapsed.
A bipartisan bill was introduced January that will, if passed, carve off a total of $128 million per year for relevant research.
But the Commerce Department didn’t wait for Congress to pass that bill. Last month, it announced “letters of intent” through the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to provide nine companies with a total of $2.013 billion in funding via the CHIPS and Science Act. The top intended recipients will be IBM, receiving $1 billion for “a new quantum foundry subsidiary for quantum-grade superconducting wafers,” and in second, wafer company GlobalFoundries, receiving $375 million.
Quantum computers exist, in a manner of speaking. But some experts still doubt that the dream of quantum computers that can perform complex computations at levels of complexity that allow millennia worth of mathematical crunching to occur in hours or days—and do so accurately—will ever come true.
Google, for its part, said in March that it thinks certain inaccurate (or “noisy”) quantum computers will be formidable cryptography machines long before we have the pristine and accurate quantum computers long envisioned.
So these executive orders are a sort of policy framework for the use of the money that will presumably soon be doled out to the private sector by NIST in furtherance of ostensible American quantum computing leadership, and an accompanying increase in cryptographic security standards.
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