Chinese team shows quantum tech can disrupt AI in a real-world task

An AI computing centre capable of predicting weather patterns weeks in advance typically carries a price tag of US$100 million or more.

Now, Chinese researchers say a small-scale quantum system can outperform such facilities at less than 1 per cent of the cost.

The findings raise questions about the long-term economics of the global artificial intelligence infrastructure race. If compact quantum systems can deliver competitive performance in specific tasks, could today’s colossal data centres costing trillions of dollars soon be obsolete?

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The breakthrough system, built on nine interacting quantum spins, matched or exceeded the performance of a classical reservoir network with 10,000 nodes in multi-step weather prediction tasks.

The findings were reported on March 25 by a joint team from the University of Science and Technology of China and Chinese University of Hong Kong. They were published in Physical Review Letters, a top physics journal, and supported by national research funding programmes in China.

In the United States, government and private investment in AI-driven weather forecasting alone has surged into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has invested almost US$100 million in upgrading its Rhea supercomputing system, while legislation such as the TAME Act authorises nearly US$188 million over five years for AI weather research.

South China Morning Post