Quantum computing may be closer than you think

Fully functional quantum computers and a new quantum industry may appear much sooner than many have anticipated—thanks to five new National Quantum Information Science Research centres just announced by the US Department of Energy. This latest development in the recently launched National Quantum Initiative Act, signed into law in December 2018, comes with $625 million in funding over five years.

It’s a huge deal: for the first time, researchers from academia, US national labs and industry will be working side by side aiming to speed up the fundamental quantum information science research. And more research should bring us closer to advanced quantum technologies and the grandest goal of quantum information science, creating a fault-tolerant quantum computer that can indefinitely compute without errors.