Inside ProQure, the UK’s strategy for picking quantum winners

Sir Peter Knight: ‘We want to make sure that we're in the game’

The UK harbours strong ambitions to put its own stamp on the global race for quantum computing, with good reason to believe it can succeed. It has a strong academic base in the field, sustained government support, mature institutions and one of the most active startup scenes.

Set against these advantages, though, are difficulties in picking which tech to support and ensuring the benefits remain in-country.
Even as the dream of a fault-tolerant, multi-purpose device might finally be hoving into view, the hardware landscape remains remarkably diverse. There are half a dozen competing classes of quantum computing architecture vying for attention, each with considerable backing, including: trapped ions; neutral atoms; photonics; superconducting; silicon spins; and topological.

“There’s lots of pluses, there’s lots of minuses; there are virtues for every one of them, and there are disadvantages for every one of them,” said Sir Peter Knight in a talk at The Economist’s Commercialising Quantum Global event in London.

It’s unlikely that any one technology will conquer all, he went on. Rather, there will be a multiplicity of approaches. “The user community have different needs. They're not all met by one platform.”

But with limited funds and a shortening timeline, the government must decide which technologies and startups to prioritise for support. It must also provide conditions such that the most promising companies will choose to scale in the UK, rather than selling up or moving abroad, as is so often the story.

Knight, professor of quantum optics at Imperial College London and chair of the UK’s Quantum Technologies Strategic Advisory Board, has been involved in shaping the UK’s quantum strategy since its inception. He has long been an advocate of using government procurement as a policy tool.

The government’s ProQure programme is a £1 billion competition designed to support the most promising startups as they scale up. Unlike traditional grant-led funding, ProQure invites companies to submit quantum computing prototypes, evaluates them against performance and scalability criteria, and then, over a series of rounds, continues funding the most promising. Applications closed in May, and the first round of contracts will be announced in October.

Knight said that benchmarking and testing are a key element, with funding rounds awarded on the basis of evidence from operational testbeds. At the end of the competitive process there will be a small number of systems remaining, which will be integrated into the national computing infrastructure for use by researchers and the public sector.

ProQure is similar to the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Quantum Benchmarking Initiative in that it employs a multi-stage process by which companies must demonstrate a credible path to a utility-scale quantum computer before advancing.

However, in view of the country’s startup retention problem, the UK goes further by integrating procurement into the model, combining validation with demand creation in an effort to foster a market and spur commercial adoption.

“We want to make sure that we're in the game. We want to be among the first countries to actually benefit from a scaled quantum computer,” Knight said. “We want to make sure that we actually anchor this into the UK. We want to make the UK an attractive place to do it; we want to be sustainable.”