But while the UK races to catch-up on AI, it\u2019s taking its eye off the ball on this next big technological wave.<\/p>\n
Two recent developments in quantum markets highlight the UK\u2019s conundrum. In September, Finland\u2019s leading quantum computing firm,\u00a0IQM, raised a \u00a3320m Series B round to scale its systems<\/a>.<\/a>\u00a0In June, Oxford Ionics \u2014 one of the UK\u2019s brightest quantum computing hopes \u2014 was\u00a0bought by the US<\/a>\u00a0<\/a>company IonQ in a billion-dollar deal<\/a>.<\/a>\u00a0The result: Finland has turbocharged its national quantum champion, while Britain has lost one of its own.<\/p>\n This is a tale of two strategies. Finland has built a quantum\u00a0industry. Britain has built a quantum\u00a0research programme. Unless we change course, the UK will again nurture world-class science only to see commercial value captured elsewhere.<\/p>\n Government intervention is essential. Quantum sits squarely in the category of markets where the government must play an active industrial role. They are capital-intensive, pre-commercial, and strategically vital \u2014 underpinning breakthroughs in energy, materials and, crucially, artificial intelligence. Within a decade, large-scale quantum computers are\u00a0expected to break today\u2019s encryption standards.\u00a0The first nations to reach that threshold will wield enormous economic and security advantages.<\/p>\n On paper the UK is doing well. It hosts the third best quantum research base in the world, the\u00a0second<\/a>\u00a0highest level of venture capital investment<\/a>, and the\u00a0second highest number of pure-play (solely<\/a>\u00a0focussed) quantum companies in the world<\/a>.<\/p>\n But the familiar pattern that haunts many UK sectors persists:\u00a0excellence in research, weakness in<\/a>\u00a0<\/a>scale-up and commercialisation.<\/a>\u00a0Britain lacks the translational infrastructure and early-stage demand to bridge the gap from lab to market. Our best firms are looking abroad. Oxford Ionics is gone;\u00a0Universal Quantum has<\/a>\u00a0<\/a>opened in Hamburg<\/a>, buoyed by a \u00a370mn German government contract \u2014\u00a0more than double the<\/a>\u00a0<\/a>value of any comparable UK procurement<\/a>;\u00a0Bristol-spinout PsiQuantum is now scaling in the United<\/a>\u00a0<\/a>States<\/a>.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the UK\u2019s \u201cquantum stack\u201d \u2014 the full set of components and supply chains needed to build and scale quantum systems, from cryogenics and lasers to advanced packaging \u2014 is worryingly thin. Germany, Finland, Denmark, and the Netherlands have all invested far more heavily in this industrial base. As with AI, Britain risks becoming the largest quantum ecosystem without its own infrastructure.<\/p>\n The next phase of policy must therefore shift from\u00a0research\u00a0to\u00a0commercialisation. That means four things.<\/p>\n First, fund applied engineering research to bridge academia and industry \u2014 focussed on overcoming bottlenecks to deployment and commercialisation. This research should focus both on \u201ctranslational\u201d research, such as qubit error correction to overcome barriers to scale, or enabling research into components, like cryogenic wiring. Finland\u2019s\u00a0technical research institute, VTT, which is partnering with IQM to build a quantum computing system<\/a>\u00a0for the Finnish government, offers a valuable precedent.<\/p>\n Second, the UK must mobilise scale-up capital. The debate around UK pensions \u2013 most recently marked by\u00a0Mansion House II in July<\/a>\u00a0\u2013\u00a0 needs to move from asset allocation benchmarks towards actually mobilising scale-up capital through British Business Bank to bet on national winners. Third, the government must put its money where its mouth is and provide large, visible procurement contracts to build out quantum system, providing market pull for proto-sovereign champions \u2013 of the kind issued by\u00a0Berlin\u2019s Aerospace Centre<\/a>.<\/p>\n Finally, to ensure that the UK does not become the largest quantum ecosystem in the world without its own infrastructure, the government needs to seriously consider investing in domestic capacity for things like testing facilities, advanced packaging, and cryogenics infrastructure \u2013 while partnering with allies where domestic investment is economically inefficient.<\/p>\n The stakes are higher than the fate of just one technology. The broader point is this: if the UK fails to build industries of the future, the value of technological change will be captured elsewhere and the only impact the UK will be left with is shrinking legacy sectors and job displacement.<\/p>\n If the UK missed the opportunity to lead in artificial intelligence, quantum offers a second chance. It would be a mistake to repeat another experiment under the same conditions.<\/p>\n Guy is a Senior Science & Tech Analyst at the Tony Blair Institute (TBI), with a \u00a0focus on UK technology industrial strategy and economic security. He is the lead author of TBI\u2019s recent\u00a0UK Quantum Industrial Strategy<\/a>\u00a0paper.<\/p>\n Photo by phamduyson<\/a> on Pixabay<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Guest Post by Guy Ward Jackson, Senior Science & Technology Policy Analyst, Tony Blair Institute. \u201cNature isn\u2019t classical,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":282233,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,115254,50,115255,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-282232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-guy-ward-jackson","tag-news","tag-tony-blair-institute","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=282232"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282232\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/282233"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=282232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=282232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=282232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Responsive](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Website-Banner-Quantum-2.gif\")
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