EuroHPC to Establish AI Factories to Advance EU AI Capabilities

The Israel Innovation Authority and the Israel Ministry of Defense (IMOD) recently announced a $62 million USD collaborative effort to establish a domestic quantum computing (QC) infrastructure. The two-pronged approach calls for the Israel Innovation Authority, part of Israel's Ministry of Economy charged with fostering domestic industrial R&D, to focus on developing QC algorithms, applications, and a related software stack to support both on-premises or cloud QC access models. For its part, the IMOD will stand up a national center to develop a complete quantum computer including a quantum processor expected to consist of 30-40 qubits, quantum control capabilities, and I/O interfacing hardware.

The US Office of Science and Technology Policy recently released its second annual National Quantum Initiative (NQI) report, a supplement to the President's FY22 Budget Request that outlines the major US government quantum information science (QIS) research activities and related funding levels out to FY 2022. As seen in Figure 1, the proposed FY2022 budget, which is targeted for about $880 million, calls for an increase of nearly 11% from the previous year. Roughly half of the funding is to come from the NQI and the other half from base agency-specific QIS R&D budgets. The figure represents the sum of Federal budgets for U.S. QIS R&D efforts in over a dozen agencies including NIST, NSF, DOE, NASA, DOD, and DHS, and it also aggregates several QIS subtopics such as computing, networking, sensing, fundamental science, and end quantum-related use cases