In October 2019, I wrote a Forbes article describing how the United States and China were locked in “the world’s most important technology race.” At that time, the situation was relatively straightforward. China had just launched its national quantum strategy aimed at achieving technological self-sufficiency. President Xi Jinping had invested billions into a vast quantum computing initiative with the expectation of achieving significant breakthroughs by 2030. The U.S. had already signed the National Quantum Initiative Act that authorized $1.2 billion in spending over five years. At the time, I didn’t believe that the level of funding was sufficient to match the Chinese commitments. In 2019, the U.S. had a lead in quantum computing primarily as a result of heavy investments made by IBM, Google and Microsoft. (Note: My firm, Moor Insights & Strategy, provides advisory and related services to many tech companies — including, from this article, Google, IBM and Microsoft. We have previously had paid business relationships with Atom Computing, D-Wave, GlobalFoundries, IonQ, Quantinuum and Rigetti Computing.) At that time, the only technology lead China had over the United States was in quantum communications. Scott Aaronson, a top theoretical computer scientist at the University of Texas, said that China held an edge in quantum communications simply because they chose to invest heavily in that area while the U.S. had opted to maintain its strong lead in quantum computation. His reasoning made sense. Google had just claimed quantum supremacy by solving a problem in 200 seconds that would take a classical computer thousands of years to solve — a quantum computation feat that China was not likely to match anytime soon. My chief concern in 2019 was that additional federal funding was needed because the quantum race would unfold over decades, not months, and therefore required a long-term financial commitment.