alt Hacker News> Why pile so much public money into quantum computing where there are (afaik) barely any useful algorithms, while Europe could instead invest in catching up on GPU infrastructure...
Because if you do not become competitive on the frontier you are doomed to perpetually play a game of catch-up. This is what happened to the EU with battery technology, renewable technology, AI, digital services, and semiconductors.
GPUs require sub-7nm design, fabrication, and packaging - all of which is nonexistent in Europe today, and would take 10-20 years at which point the EU-27 would have fallen behind the frontier again.
Europe cannot be competitive in bleeding edge and legacy packaging in 2026-36 given how heavily subsidized and tightly integrated the Asian and American cluster is (eg. I can get 0-1% interest rate loan terms with tax holidays and subsidizes in the 9 figure range in much of Asia and the US). Europe CAN reinvest in 2D packaging, materials, and metrology (which is critical for quantum).
Europe cannot be competitive in bleeding edge fabrication in 2026-36 given how heavily subsidized and tightly integrated the Asian and American cluster is (eg. I can get 0-1% interest rate loan terms with tax holidays and subsidizes in the 9 figure range in much of Asia and the US). Europe CAN be competitive in legacy (28nm and above), power, and compound semiconductor fabrication (this also had a downstream impact on quantum).
Europe cannot be competitive in chip design in 2026-36 given how heavily subsidized and tightly integrated the Asian and American cluster is. It CAN work on building the next generation of tooling needed to design quantum circuits and conduct metrology.
Quantum applications of Sensing, Optics, Communication, Key Distribution, Computing, Packaging, and Hardware Design are all greenfield segments that everyone is at a roughly equal starting point at. All these technologies have directly relevant applications in telecommunications, defense, semiconductor packaging, and computing.
And this is what can help some EU states regain relevance in the competitive frontier. There's a reason France has been working heavily on this for a decade.
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Hmm, I think you provide a compelling narrative. However I'm not very convinced.
I think AI is a good example. EU wide there are plenty of public HPC centers and in 2020 we had (relative to the world) plenty of compute. In other words, we had the tech, we had the compute, and we had the know how. And yet we don't really have a competitive AI scene in Europe. There were some very small projects launched to try to train LLMs. All of them were no more than learning exercises.
How will QC be different?
"This is what happened to the EU with battery technology, renewable technology, AI, digital services, and semiconductors."
I don't agree with the "semiconductor" take of that. ASML, a European company funded by a lot of private and non-European capital, is basically producing the machines that are making all of the high-end semi conductors of the past few years. They have received grants from the EU, arguably small in compared to the private funding though.
IMEC, and their NanoIC research on the other hand receives a lot of funding from the EU.