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The Manhattan Project, a response to Germany’s combination of innovation and military power, unleashed nuclear physics on the world. Its success positioned the United States at the forefront of progress in critical technologies and demonstrated that innovation was central both to economic prosperity and national security.
Today, in a new era of strategic competition with authoritarian China, liberal democracies, including those in minilateral groupings such as the Quad, AUKUS and NATO, are identifying their own modern day Manhattan Projects.
The Australian Government’s announcement earlier this year of an almost $1 billion investment in PsiQuantum confirmed that Australia had set its sights on breakthroughs in quantum computing to usher in a comparable technological revolution.
The US has quickly followed suit, announcing its own PsiQuantum partnership today. As one of only six advanced capabilities in AUKUS pillar two, it is noteworthy that two of the AUKUS partners have invested close to $2 billion to build the world’s first and second—respectively—“fault tolerant quantum computers” (FTQCs).
Indeed, the only better strategic move for Australia than being the first mover in this area was to be joined by its ally, and AUKUS and Quad partner, the US. While these specific projects are both with PsiQuantum, the ambition and drive for breakthroughs in all areas of quantum computing is to Australia’s advantage, and the involvement of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)—the organisation responsible for the first breakthroughs in the internet—should give governments, industry and other stakeholders confidence in investing further in the name of economic security.
We know through Beijing’s ‘Made in China 2025’ plan that quantum computing is one of the industries it has prioritised. Success in such areas of innovation will take investment at the national level and leveraging international structures—including AUKUS pillar two—to ensure the ambitious endeavours of industry and current finite talent pools are incentivised.
Make no mistake, the quantum approach in which both governments have invested will be difficult to achieve. They require high-volume semiconductor manufacturing and cryogenic infrastructure—essentially very big fridges—to be built rapidly. The skills shortage in the semiconductor industry is a well-known problem, and the FTQC industry needs these same workers to build its components. Also, programmers capable of developing algorithms to run on a full-scale FTQC that can lead to breakthroughs in emission reductions and drug discovery are in limited supply.
While both nations have started with PsiQuantum, success, like the original Manhattan Project, will take a collective effort. As Australia and the US commit to bringing FTQC online within the next decade, co–ordinating under AUKUS and the alliance to drive rapid upskilling across the industry will be critical. This major investment will need more than just money to support the quantum industry and academic partners. It could also involve reviewing immigration constraints that affect workforce mobility and training across Australia and the US, and facilitating pathways for greater industry engagement with FTQCs to prepare them to seize the benefits of the first machines when they arrive.
It will also be vital to capitalise on progress under AUKUS, including to make sure the US International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) and export controls don’t hinder progress across the two FTQC sites in Brisbane and Chicago. This preparedness and education of industry and government users of the computers are what will ensure there is quick progress in areas such as climate sustainability and pharmaceuticals when the first machines come online, delivering quickly on the promise of economic, social and national security benefits.
Australia’s investment in building the world’s first FTQC in Queensland and growing the broader industry and academic activity in Brisbane is a significant step in harnessing its decade’s worth of public investments in basic research in quantum technologies, giving the nation a globally recognised competitive edge. Taking global leadership in quantum investment ahead of—albeit closely followed by—the US shows that Australia has learnt its lesson from three decades ago when the government missed the boat on investing in the photovoltaics research team at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), which moved to China where it received support to become a solar power giant.
DARPA’s announcement to concentrate its quantum computing efforts around the newly established Illinois Quantum and Microelectronic Park is validation that Australia is leading the world in FTQC technology and is serious about having the upper hand as strategic competition with China intensifies. The Biden administration’s 2022 export controls on advanced semiconductors aimed at preventing China from bolstering its military capabilities are likely to have only slowed down China’s military progress. Unable to access advanced semiconductors, Beijing has accelerated domestic semiconductor investments. Without our own innovation— including through AUKUS—China will catch up and, given its capacity to hyperscale its industries, potentially surpass US technological dominance in AI and specific military capabilities such as hypersonics. Indeed it told the world that was its aim in its Made in China 2025 plan.
The controls denying China access to advanced semiconductors have opened a brief window for Australia, our national security partners in private industry, and researchers to establish a decisive lead in quantum computing. This opportunity is likely to bolster the alignment between Australia and its allies, given the limitless applications of quantum computing. For example, quantum communications have the potential to make it all but impossible to decipher secure communications, protecting systems against malign attacks from both quantum and classical computers.
Australia’s National Quantum Strategy showcases the government’s risk appetite for pursuing strategic investments that will spawn sovereign critical capabilities supporting our national security and way of life. Some argue that, if the world’s first quantum computer can be built in Brisbane, then it is possible to build nuclear-powered submarines, given the trilateral collaborative nature of AUKUS and the reality of working with allies that have been building them for many decades.
The consortium investment model favoured by both Australia and the US in their commitment to quantum serves as an example of public-private research collaboration models for other technology areas. Notably, the strong co-operation between industry and academia—with PsiQuantum recently announcing a partnership with five universities in Queensland and a similar scale of academic engagement in Illinois—demonstrates how AUKUS pillar two technologies require engagement across industry, academia and government.
This is difficult at a large scale, but it is achievable. Ideally, the new UK government will head down a similar path, though one advantage of AUKUS is to leverage both collective and respective expertise.
This is Australia’s Manhattan moment. Delivering on the promise of quantum computing will require ongoing collaboration with allies to reap the reward of this bold investment.