£1bn funding pledge puts Britain in the quantum race

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The British government has announced a £1bn funding pledge for quantum computing, which promises to transform human life by processing enormous data sets at exponentially high speeds. This could be used for anything from discovering new medicines to optimising green technologies. The pledge will make the UK the first country to roll out quantum computers at scale and is an attempt to compete with the US, which has already stolen a march in artificial intelligence. The potential of quantum is enormous: Google said last year that it had built an algorithm that allowed one of its computers to operate 13,000 times faster than a regular machine. But this was to solve a narrow problem. A real-life, practical breakthrough is out of reach for as long as quantum computers remain unable to handle millions of qubits.