German Chancellor Angela Merkel will inaugurate on Tuesday the first quantum computer installed in Germany by the American tech giant IBM, as Europe intensifies efforts to develop this promising technology. The device, known as "Q System One," was installed near Stuttgart in collaboration with the German research institute Fraunhofer and has been operational since the beginning of April. This is IBM's first quantum computer outside the United States, allowing Europeans to access its technology via cloud computing.
Merkel, who wrote a thesis on quantum chemistry during her studies, will deliver a speech during the online opening ceremony. Quantum technology enables the use of powerful computers that far exceed the capabilities of the best current supercomputers, by harnessing the remarkable physical properties of tiny particles. Instead of the traditional computing unit "bit," which can take on values of 0 or 1, quantum computing uses "qubits." Qubits can hold multiple values simultaneously, theoretically allowing for parallel processing.
Currently, quantum technology is largely still in the experimental stage, but it has the potential to solve extremely complex problems that current and future computers would struggle with in a fraction of the time, enabling calculations of paths, drug development, and decryption, for example. France and Germany are already aspiring to play a leading role in this field, with Paris announcing an investment of 1.8 billion euros over five years in January, while Berlin plans to invest two billion dollars in building a quantum computer by 2025. The United States currently dominates this technology.
