Shared federal and state investment worth almost $1 billion will help a Queensland university startup join the race to create the world's first fault-tolerant quantum computer.
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Frontier technology company PsiQuantum, which has already begun working with the US Department of Energy to develop the cryogenic engineering expertise it needs for the project at National Accelerator Laboratory in Paolo Alto, California, will use the Australian investment to set up an Asia-Pacific base in Brisbane.
The company also has similar research underway at the Daresbury Laboratory in the north west of England, where it has access to one of Europe's largest liquid-helium (around minus 2700 degrees Celsius) cryogenic plants.
The Queensland and federal governments will each inject $470 million into the Brisbane project to potentially generate a future manufacturing and production partnership.
Quantum computers are considered the next major development in computing, delivering tremendous data processing power of qubits (quantum bits), well beyond the capabilities of today's super-computers.
Their enormous processing power can help solve problems conventional computers can't and can help drive advances in areas like new medicines, AI and the transition to net zero. They can also break existing high-end encryption, which makes them of enormous strategic importance.
The scientific race is on internationally - but most specifically between the US and China - to develop the technology, with Google understood to be pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into its secretive Santa Barbara-based laboratory project which is known only as Google X. IBM is also working on a similar program.
Conventional computers use the language of bits, which take values of zero and one. Quantum computers can take a value of zero or one, and also a complex combination of zero and one at the same time.
Current quantum computers are designated as Noisy, Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) systems with at most a few hundred qubits of information. To achieve the full potential of quantum computing, error correction is required to suppress the "noise" in the computation and to limit the number of errors in the algorithm output.
PsiQuantum believes that it has the fastest and most feasible path to a large-scale fault-tolerant system, based largely on existing technologies and infrastructure, including high-volume semiconductor manufacturing, packaging, and high-power cryogenic systems.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said that the country needed to "make bold investments today if we want to see a future made in Australia".
Around 400 highly skilled jobs are expected to be generated by the investment.
