The U.S. government has blacklisted Chinese companies associated with the development of components for traditional computers or smartphones and 5G network technology, and now quantum computer makers are coming in.
The U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security just added 27 companies to its list of banned entities in the United States, including several Chinese quantum computing companies. This is the first of its kind.
The U.S. is imposing these restrictions for national security reasons. Quantum technologies are developing rapidly. It is no secret that the Chinese are making great strides in this field. It is safe to say that they are now one step ahead of the United States. That is why the U.S. government prefers to re-insure and block key corporations in order to limit the possibility of using quantum technologies for espionage on U.S. territory.
According to the Financial Times, eight companies from China have been blacklisted. All of them are marked as cooperating with the Chinese army. One would think that American companies working on the same kind of computers do not cooperate with their country’s army They are designed to support the development of military technology, to fight submarines, to crack encryption or to develop secure encryption.
The Chinese recently announced the achievement of true quantum superiority on their quantum computer called Jiuzhang. The machine completed an extremely complex simulation in just 180 seconds, which took the world’s most powerful supercomputer, Fugaku, 600 million years, and China’s Sunway TaihuLight, the third fastest in the world, 2.5 billion years.
Not only that, but by the number of supercomputers, China is the leader in the world. Experts believe that the Celestial Empire is ahead of the United States and Japan by at least six months, if not a whole year. Interestingly, a few months ago, two supercomputer systems reached a computing power exceeding the 1 exaflop limit, but the Chinese government and companies involved in the project kept this information strictly confidential. And all because of fears of sanctions from the U.S. government against the companies that helped build the supercomputers.
