Chancellor Commits £1bn To Commercial Quantum Computers - Silicon UK
UK Bets £1bn on Quantum Computers That Don't Exist Yet
The UK government has announced a procurement programme worth up to £1bn to buy commercial-scale quantum computers from British companies by the early 2030s — an ambition that collides with an inconvenient fact: the country currently has zero fault-tolerant quantum computers. Fully fault-tolerant machines, capable of the tasks the government is promising, would require hundreds of thousands of qubits. Nobody has built one yet.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves made the announcement on 17 March at the National Quantum Computing Centre outside Oxford, flanked by Technology Secretary Liz Kendall and Science Minister Patrick Vallance, who drove the policy. The programme, called ProQure: Scaling UK Quantum Computing, will invite companies to submit proposals to build state-of-the-art prototypes for government evaluation. The most promising systems would then be procured for use by scientists, researchers, the public sector, and businesses.
"We have pledged to procure up to £1bn of quantum computers from the first UK companies to successfully make them at commercial scale, firing the starting gun on a global race and making sure that the UK is at the front of the pack," Reeves said.
The government is framing the programme as a deliberate attempt to avoid repeating the AI experience, where UK research excellence produced American corporate winners. The most cited example: DeepMind, founded in London in 2010 and acquired by Google in 2014 for £400m. Kendall was unusually direct on this point. "Too many people feel they have to move to the US in order to get the funding and support they need to grow and scale their company," she told the Guardian. "I do look at what's happened on AI. I do think we need to learn the lessons and make sure we give our brilliant scientists, spinouts and startups the ability to stay here and make it happen."
The £1bn procurement commitment sits within a broader £2bn quantum package. Of that total, over £500m is earmarked for helping quantum companies scale and develop applications in pharmaceuticals, financial services, and energy. £400m targets breakthroughs in sensing and navigation. Quantum networking receives £125m and quantum sensing £205m, with £90m for infrastructure and £20m for skills and commercialisation programmes. The five National Quantum Research Hubs receive an additional £13.8m, and a £12m commercialisation skills centre is being established.
The GOV.UK announcement also claimed quantum could create more than 100,000 UK jobs and generate £212bn in economic impact over the next two decades — figures that sit in the same rhetorical bucket as "the next AI" without being tied to any published economic model.
The gap between the announcement's confidence and the actual state of quantum hardware is notable. The Guardian report acknowledged it plainly: "fully fault-tolerant quantum computers, capable of realising some of the tasks that augur major scientific breakthroughs, are still some way off as they would require machines capable of hosting hundreds of thousands of quantum bits." The government's own framing in its press release described quantum computers as systems that "use principles of quantum physics to process information" — a description that would not be out of place in a general-interest explainer, not a policy document announcing a billion-pound programme.
Phasecraft CEO Ashley Montanaro offered a more grounded reaction. "The investments announced today are critical to Britain's continued leadership in the quantum race," he said, while adding a caveat the government did not emphasise: "It's essential that the procurement programme includes a significant quantum software element — the full potential of quantum computing can only be unlocked when quantum algorithms development is prioritised alongside hardware development."
The procurement logic is not unreasonable as an industrial strategy. Government demand signals can help companies raise private capital, de-risk development, and demonstrate market viability. But procurement cannot substitute for solving the underlying physics. Error rates on current qubits remain high. Scaling to the fault-tolerant regime — where errors can be corrected faster than they accumulate — has been demonstrated in laboratory settings at small scale but not yet productised at commercial scale by any vendor, UK-based or otherwise.
The UK does have credible quantum companies. Quantinuum, a US-UK firm, recently reached a $10bn valuation. IonQ announced a Quantum Innovation Centre with the University of Cambridge on the same day as the procurement announcement. BT and HSBC are listed as industry partners with interests in quantum networking and post-quantum cryptography respectively. Whether any of these can deliver a commercially scalable fault-tolerant machine by the early 2030s is an open question — one the government is betting £1bn will help them answer.
The announcement was paired with a separate £500m Sovereign AI Fund, also launching in April. Vallance, Kendall, and Reeves are constructing a narrative of a government that has learned from the AI decade — one willing to use procurement, not just research grants, to anchor transformative technology on UK soil. Whether it works depends entirely on physics that has not yet cooperated.
Sources: