The United States leads in quantum computing but lags behind China in quantum communications and can't dominate the emerging quantum revolution without coordinating tightly with allied democracies, according to a new report from the Hoover Institution. The report, titled "The Quantum Revolution: A Guide for Allied Policymakers," warns that the quantum technology race isn't a single two-horse sprint like artificial intelligence but rather three separate contests—computing, sensing, and communications—running on different timelines with fragmented global supply chains. The report argues that treating quantum as an AI-style race between the U.S. and China is a "category error" that risks misallocating attention and money at a critical moment.
According to various metrics cited in the report, the U.S. currently leads in quantum computing, but China is "meaningfully ahead" in quantum communications, having built the largest terrestrial key-distribution networks and demonstrated satellite links across thousands of kilometers. Quantum sensing is a genuine three-way contest among the United States, Europe, and China. The exotic hardware underpinning all quantum technologies—dilution refrigerators that chill processors colder than deep space, narrow-linewidth lasers, single-photon detectors, and cryogenic control electronics—is produced by a thin, scattered set of suppliers concentrated in Europe and Japan. Finland makes some of the best refrigerators, the Netherlands and Switzerland make detectors and control stacks, and Japan anchors the optics and lasers that nearly every quantum modality needs. Many of these components are produced by single firms with specialized intellectual property, and the supply chain remains poorly mapped.
The report finds that federal migration to post-quantum cryptography—new classical algorithms that can resist future quantum attacks—carries an estimated cost of $7 billion and a target date of 2035, but allied governments should be moving faster. "A quantum computer large enough to crack standard internet encryption algorithms at scale does not exist," the authors write, noting it would require at least 100,000 qubits and potentially much larger. Still, the "harvest now, decrypt later" threat means encrypted data can be stolen today and stored until a capable quantum computer comes online, potentially exposing secrets with a long shelf life. The report emphasizes that "there is not likely to be one podium with a single gold medalist" in quantum technologies, and no one country is self-sufficient.
The report explains that China, having been hit with export controls on semiconductors, is now racing to build self-sufficiency across the entire quantum supply chain while positioning itself to make Western democracies depend on Chinese hardware. This likely includes a state-sponsored campaign to access and copy Western intellectual property and huge investments to train the next generation of quantum talent in China, while the allies have no equivalent strategy. China doesn't have to win the entire supply chain to cause significant problems—it just needs to seize one chokepoint, much like how the Netherlands doesn't design or produce semiconductors but ASML's dominance in extreme ultraviolet lithography machines gives Amsterdam leverage over an industry it could never have dominated outright. The quantum stack is full of latent chokepoints that haven't yet consolidated in areas like cryogenics, photon detection, error correction software, or control chips. The report also notes a compounding uncertainty: quantum computing doesn't follow Moore's Law, and even if large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computers arrive in the early 2030s, the companies that produce them may lack a commercial market to pay back their large capital investments, making the quantum computing race fundamentally geopolitical rather than commercial.
The bottom line, according to the report, is that the U.S. is unlikely to dominate quantum the way it now dominates AI because the field is too distributed, the supply chain too dependent on allies, the decisive applications too speculative, and any breakthrough will diffuse too fast to bottle up. The task isn't to win a race but to orchestrate an alliance with a clear division of labor: the U.S. provides the platform, software, and integration layers; Europe and Japan anchor the hardware chokepoints; and Britain, the EU, and Australia lead in sensing and GPS-free navigation work. The report recommends hardening each lane on purpose, coordinating export controls, fixing visa and immigration rules that drive away foreign-born talent, and funding basic research at universities and national labs where missing algorithms will come from. The race framing flatters American strengths and hides American dependencies—but building a resilient coalition is the only viable strategy that fits the technology we actually have.