Challenges and Opportunities for Securing a Robust US Quantum Computing Supply Chain

Although China represents more than one-third of the global market for semiconductors, the country relies heavily on foreign sources, especially U.S. chipmakers and foundries headquartered in other Asian countries, for a majority of devices critical to Chinese-made products ranging from smartphones to industrial machinery and supercomputers. For the past few decades, China sought to develop an indigenous capability in an effort to reduce its dependence on the foreign supply of components. Its most recent major effort, the “Made-in-China” semiconductor initiative launched in 2015, targeted supplying 40% of China's semiconductor demand with homegrown products by 2020 and 70% by 2025.

According to a recent Hyperion Research study of 135 US quantum computing (QC) technology developers across the academic, commercial, and government sectors, selected financial indicators in the QC commercial sector have yet to settle into any easily characterized profile. For example, Hyperion Research estimates that while more than one third of the reporting QC suppliers in the survey had revenues of five million dollars or more in 2019, almost half that supplied revenue figures had revenues of less than $500 thousand or no sales in 2019. Likewise, survey respondents indicated that the appropriateness of QC R&D funding differ greatly across the corporate, government, and VC spaces, citing a need for more government funding while expressing concern that current VC funding for the sector may be excessive. Finally, when asked about a potential quantum winter, QC suppliers were much more pessimistic than the base of current and potential QC users, with about half of QC suppliers believing a quantum winter is somewhat or highly likely in the next decade, twice that of counterpart QC end users.