After a nudge and a wink from various connections, Anthony Albanese and Steven Miles have gone down to the racetrack and placed $940 million in a single bet on an untried horse in a race so complicated, so difficult, that it makes it look relatively simple to combine the Melbourne Cup, the Bathurst 1000, the Stawell Gift and Olympic synchronised swimming into a single event.

The race – to build a genuinely useful quantum computer – is being run all over the world with backing by the biggest technology companies, multiple governments and all the major venture capital funds.

To complicate the matter, scores of owners have entered a variety of different beasts for this is being run just beyond the bleeding edge of science.

It’s not just horses for courses, but also fish, fowl and various types of fur trying to bridge the gap between theory and commercial practice.

‘Country mile ahead’?

The Queensland and federal Labor governments have been convinced to put their money (your money) on the nose of what claims to be a sprinter – a cheetah “a country mile ahead” of the opposition, or so  Australia’s chief scientist, Cathy Foley, told the Australian Financial Review.

Dr Foley was a little more circumspect on the ABC’s 7.30 program.

Having one of the first usable  fault-tolerant quantum computers here in Australia “is definitely a possibility”, she said.

“Of course there are going to be twists and turns.

“It’s high risk and it’s also challenging, but it’s something where we’re giving it a go.”

High-risk venture

The usual approach when investing in something that is “high risk” is to hedge your bet, to diversify, but Messrs Albanese and Miles have done the equivalent of picking a single number on the roulette wheel.

Despite the way it has often been reported, the federal government’s billion-dollar bet on solar panels is not being placed on a single company or technology.

The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) is looking to invest in opportunities across the solar supply chain – diversifying, hedging its bets.

The $940 million punt on a relatively small American company, PsiQuantum, is the opposite of that approach.

The rather esoteric nature of quantum computing seems to have discouraged broader questioning of this extraordinary bet. It’s much easier to get people excited about migration and housing.

Scrutiny on bet

That may change a little on Thursday afternoon when the relevant federal department – Ed Husic’s Department of Industry, Science and Resources – fronts Senate Estimates.

Senators could be expected to show some interest in how the biggest single bet in the government’s Future Made In Australia policy came about.

Reporting by InnovationAus.com indicates California-based PsiQuantum started the chocolate wheel spinning by approaching the Queensland government, meeting with Treasurer Cameron Dick first in April 2022, and then again in July and August, both in Australia and in the US. (The Queensland government’s excellent transparency regulations don’t keep ministerial meetings secret, unlike the federal government.)

The Queensland approach is intriguing. One of the four PsiQuantum founders did his undergraduate degree at the University of Queensland, but has since spent all his working life overseas. The other Australian in the group is a product of the University of NSW – an institution with a strong quantum research record. The founders have more commonality through Bristol University – three of the four were there – than Australia, let alone Queensland.

Mr Husic was brought on board with meetings here in December 2022, and in the US in January last year when he visited PsiQuantum’s Palo Alto headquarters.

Brisbane base

Whatever took place in those meetings, PsiQuantum was enthused enough in April 2023 to register as a company in Australia, based in Brisbane.

That was one month after announcing it would open an advanced research and development facility in the UK, thanks to a $17 million investment by the British government.

The two Australian governments might not be diversifying, but PsiQuantum certainly has been.

A week after PsiQuantum registering, Ed Husic released the National Quantum Strategy, followed in August by calling for select expressions of interest.

Some 20 companies responded, including established Australian quantum pioneers. A specialist committee set up by the federal government to advise on quantum computing was not consulted, but PsiQuantum hired a firm of lobbyists with strong Labor connections.

Unsurprisingly, the firm produced a glowing report about PsiQuantum’s ability to build the world’s first large commercial quantum computer in Brisbane and how wonderful that would be for Queensland, Australia and the world.

Big promises

On April 30, Anthony Albanese and Steven Miles announced their $940 million bet.

PsiQuantum routinely makes big promises about how soon it will win the quantum computing race. Before landing the big Australian dollars and the British pounds, it had raised a little over $1 billion in venture capital, giving it a valuation of about $5.2 billion.

The company’s theoretical worth now won’t be known until details are decided and disclosed of how much equity Australia and Queensland are getting for their bet.

For a little context of how crowded and complicated the field is in this race, The Quantum Insider at the end of last year published its rankings of the top companies in the running.

PsiQuantum made the list of the top 48 hardware outfits at No.31, up against the giants of IBM, Google, Microsoft, Intel et al, but also three Australian companies – Diraq and Silicon Quantum Computing based in Sydney plus Canberra’s Quantum Brilliance – at No.18, 45 and 38 respectively.

The rankings don’t necessarily mean much but the scale of the field does.

PsiQuantum not alone

PsiQuantum isn’t the only company chasing a photon-based solution. French company Quandela in October delivered its inaugural quantum computer to a data centre owned by OVHcloud, marking OVHcloud as the first European cloud services provider to possess a quantum system that operates on photonic processors.

Read the full list for a taste of the competition with their runners using trapped ions, carbon nanotubes, superconducting, individual atoms, traditional transistors, electrons within a superfluid helium medium, cloud-based quantum computing, quantum dot-based chips and arrays of neutral atoms. Beam me up, Scotty.

They come from the US, China, Japan, Israel, Canada and all over Europe – billions of dollars in private money, government money, defence industry money. And that’s just the ones we know about, never mind the efforts of the more secretive types. China, the US and Canada have developed full quantum computers.

Still coming is the ability to usefully use quantum computers, the software, when they are serious. It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it.

Against all this, PsiQuantum is stating as fact – and we taxpayers are buying – that by 2029 in Brisbane “PsiQuantum’s first utility-scale system will be in the regime of 1 million physical qubits and hyperscale in footprint with a modular architecture that’s able to leverage existing cryogenic cooling technologies”.

(Qubits, not to be confused with ark-measuring cubits, are the bedrock two-state unit of quantum computing. One of PsiQuantum’s competitors last year broke the 1000-qubit barrier, sort of.)

‘Very brave, Minister’

I’ve been around a while. In an earlier life I edited a computer magazine in Hong Kong. My first job back in Australia was the AFR computer round. (It was very simple job back then.) I’ve heard lots of promises and spin over the decades. When I hear a CEO make those sorts of promises, I think of Sir Humphrey and “very brave, Minister”.

Still, there are stranger things than the idea of Brisbane quickly developing the necessary workforce and superconductivity skills for quickly building the world’s first big fault-tolerant, commercially-viable quantum computer. There’s the idea of Adelaide building massive as-yet-undesigned-by-a-committee nuclear-powered submarines.

I hope the Albanese/Miles bet comes off. I really do, but it’s a very brave bet – the result of which won’t be known for another couple of election cycles.

And it runs counter to all the theory and practice of diversified investing.