China beats Google to claim the world’s most powerful quantum computer

By Matthew Sparkes

A team in China has demonstrated that it has the world’s most powerful quantum computer, leapfrogging the previous record holder, Google.

Jian-Wei Pan at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei and his colleagues say their quantum computer has solved a problem in just over an hour that would take the world’s most powerful classical supercomputer eight years to crack, and may yet be capable of exponentially higher performance.

The problem, which has become a benchmark in quantum computing, involves simulating a quantum …