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They lag behind Google, but Alibaba and Baidu are also fighting for quantum supremacy
China has been pouring millions into quantum computing, but it’s still looking for ways to catch up
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This article originally appeared on ABACUS
In an event that was compared to the first flight of the Wright brothers, Google announced on Wednesday that it managed to solve in minutes a problem that would take the world’s fastest supercomputer 10,000 years to solve.
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“For those of us working in science and technology, it’s the ‘hello world’ moment we’ve been waiting for -- the most meaningful milestone to date in the quest to make quantum computing a reality,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote.
IBM has cast doubt on Google’s claims of quantum supremacy -- the point at which a quantum computer can solve problems a traditional computer can’t -- and the company said that the task of Google’s quantum computer could actually be accomplished in 2.5 days by a classical system, not 10,000 years.
But if Google is hyping its accomplishment, it has reason to do so. It’s competing with the likes of IBM and Microsoft in the quantum computing race. And they’re not the only ones.
Two of China’s tech giants have also made quantum computing a top priority, hoping to catch up in the field: Alibaba and Baidu.
Alibaba, China's ecommerce giant
Alibaba is probably best known as the company behind the dominant Chinese ecommerce site Taobao, but the company also provides cloud services and has been working on quantum computing for years. It opened its first research center in 2015.
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