It looks like we're taking a gamble, but will it be a winner or a loser?

Australia is making a billion-dollar bet on a 'useful' quantum computer. So what are we buying?

Three years from now, if all goes to plan, an industrial estate near Brisbane Airport will house an enormous quantum computer: one of the most complex machines ever built.

From the outside, it'll be a hangar topped with a plume of white steam from its cryogenic freezers.

Inside, it'll be like nothing else on Earth: racks of cabinets cooled to the temperature of outer space, holding custom-built silicon wafers that can detect individual photons, particles that have no mass and are also (confusingly) waves.

The Californian start-up behind the machine, PsiQuantum, says it will be world's first useful quantum computer, able to solve problems conventional computers cannot.

All up, it will cost more than $1 billion. Most of that will come from taxpayers, thanks to a massive investment from the Queensland and federal governments........

M$ enters the fray.

Microsoft creates chip it says shows quantum computers are 'years, not decades' away.

Microsoft has unveiled a new chip that it said showed quantum computing is "years, not decades" away, predicting that a fundamental change in computing technology is much closer than recently believed.

Quantum computing holds the promise of carrying out calculations that would take today's systems millions of years and could unlock discoveries in medicine, chemistry and many other fields where near-infinite seas of possible combinations of molecules confound classical computers.

Quantum computers also pose a threat to today's cybersecurity, as most encryption relies on the assumption that brute-force attacks would take too long to succeed.

The biggest challenge of quantum computers is that a fundamental building block called a qubit, which is similar to a bit in classical computing, is incredibly fast but also extremely difficult to control and prone to errors.

Microsoft said the Majorana 1 chip it has developed is less prone to those errors than rivals and provided as evidence a scientific paper set to be published in academic journal Nature..........

Cheers.