China has invested approximately $15 billion in quantum computing, according to estimates from CSIS China Power. The logic of this investment aims to build a regional infrastructure whose migration cost rapidly exceeds the financial capacities of its partners. When universities, regulators, and companies in a country have integrated these computing capabilities into their daily operations, switching platforms becomes an accounting problem as much as a political one.
The Essentials
- China is investing approximately $15 billion USD in quantum computing, according to CSIS China Power, with the objective of an integrated digital ecosystem inscribed in the 14th five-year plan.
- The central mechanism is progressive lock-in: partners integrate Chinese computing capacities to the point where migration to another platform would cost between $10 and $50 billion USD depending on their size, according to Rhodium Group estimates.
- Quantum computing structures administrative decisions, communications encryption, and financial models at a fundamental infrastructure level, without replaceable applicative equivalents.
- Partner democracies must choose between refusing access to superior computing capacities and accepting a dependence whose exit conditions they no longer control.
- The stakes for 2035-2040 concern the ability of a closed technological ecosystem to sustain long-term innovation without depreciating under the effects of isolation.
Quantum Computing as Infrastructure, Not as Tool
To understand why $15 billion produces lock-in rather than simply competitive advantage, one must grasp what quantum computing concretely does in an advanced economy.
A quantum computer does not replace a classical server for sending emails. It solves classes of problems that classical architectures process too slowly to be useful: large-scale logistics optimization, molecular simulation for pharmacology, cryptography and, most importantly, breaking current encryption protocols. This latter capacity makes it an infrastructure of sovereignty as much as a commercial technology.
States that integrate Chinese quantum platforms into their banking systems, their government communication networks, or their industrial simulation processes are not choosing a software supplier. They are laying a foundational layer upon which everything else stacks. Migrating to another architecture, once this layer is installed, amounts to changing the foundations of an occupied building.
China’s 14th five-year plan, whose technological objectives run through 2025 with horizons extended beyond, explicitly plans an integrated digital ecosystem. The expression is technical, but its significance is strategic: to create functional chains of dependence between Chinese capacities and partner economies, notably in Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and certain African countries engaged in the digital corridors of the Belt and Road Initiative.
The Lock-In Calculation: $10 to $50 Billion per Country
The cost of exit from quantum infrastructure grows disproportionately as integration deepens. Each new applicative layer built on this infrastructure adds interdependencies that complicate any subsequent migration. A country that begins by integrating computing capacities in a single sector, for example financial risk management, creates institutional habits, specialized training, and data exchange protocols that quickly overflow into adjacent sectors.
The boundary between partial adoption and structural dependence is crossed without explicit decision, through accumulation of locally rational optimization choices. This dynamic makes the mechanism difficult to counter through reactive policies: when decision-makers become aware of the level of integration reached, the cost of exit has already attained a threshold that transforms any alternative into a major political project rather than a simple procurement decision.
Temporality thus works against partners, independent of their initial intention to preserve their autonomy.
Rhodium Group’s estimates on exit costs warrant attention. A range of $10 to $50 billion USD per partner country, depending on the size of the economy and the degree of integration, represents a multiplier of 3 to 15 times the initial investment that China itself is making.
This asymmetric ratio is the key to the mechanism. China finances entry; the partner finances exit. And the cost of exit increases with time, as national systems interconnect with quantum infrastructure.
This situation has a precedent in technological history. Countries that adopted SAP systems in the 1990s for administrative management discovered twenty years later that migration to a competitor represented years of work and costs often exceeding the initial contract value. Quantum computing pushes this logic to a higher level of criticality, because it touches systems where continuity of operation is non-negotiable: financial networks, state communications, critical infrastructure.
American export controls on advanced semiconductors, analyzed in detail in a previous article in the journal, aimed precisely to slow this trajectory. The result is ambiguous: they constrained China to accelerate its domestic investment in alternative sectors, of which quantum computing is a part.
Who Signs These Contracts and Why
Integration does not happen through direct constraint. It happens through economic attractiveness and lack of alternative.
For a country like Pakistan, Thailand, or Kazakhstan, accessing quantum computing capabilities via Chinese platforms represents a technological leap that no Western country offers on comparable terms, neither in price nor in institutional support. China offers complete packages: infrastructure, training, integration into public administrations, sometimes partial financing through Chinese development banks.
Universities are a particularly effective vector. When a country’s researchers train the next generation of physicists and engineers on Chinese quantum platforms, they create cognitive as much as technical dependence. Acquired competencies accumulate around specific architectures, particular protocols, and proprietary tools. Switching platforms then implies retraining and losing years of human capital accumulation.
Private companies follow the same logic of short-term optimization. A Thai pharmaceutical firm that can access Chinese quantum molecular simulation to develop its products at marginal cost will not wait for a Western alternative to arrive on the market at comparable price. It integrates, optimizes its processes, and finds itself, two or three years later, in a dependence it had not anticipated as such.
The Western Response, Between Lag and Catching Up
The United States and Europe are not without response. The American National Quantum Initiative Act mobilized significant investments in fundamental research and public-private partnerships, with actors like IBM Quantum, Google Quantum AI, and IonQ advancing on superconducting and trapped-ion architectures. The European Union launched its Quantum Flagship with one billion euros over ten years, a real but modest effort compared to the Chinese scale.
The constraint is also institutional. Liberal democracies subject partnerships in technology with foreign governments to parliamentary debates, risk evaluations, and conditions on data governance. These safeguards are legitimate, but they lengthen offer timelines. An administration seeking to quickly access advanced computing capacities will not wait two years for a European call for proposals to be finalized.
Enterprise AI follows a similar pattern of progressive dependence, as analyzed in a previous article in the journal: the distinction between tool and structuring system is often crossed without decision-makers being fully aware. With quantum computing, the stakes are of a superior magnitude, because the decisions resulting from it affect national security and the integrity of state data.
The most promising response currently being developed is that of technological alliances among democracies. The AUKUS partnership, in its technological component, and discussions within the Quad explicitly include quantum cooperation. The idea is to build a credible alternative offering for countries still hesitating, before their window of choice closes.
Closed Architecture and Its Effects on Innovation
The question for 2035-2040 is there: can a technological ecosystem designed to retain its partners durably produce innovation?
The history of computing provides some elements of answer, but no certainty. Closed architectures have sometimes triumphed in short windows, before being circumvented or supplanted by open approaches. The Windows operating system dominated two decades before cloud computing and open systems partially redrawed the landscape. Proprietary telecommunications standards of the 1980s resisted until interoperability became a regulatory requirement.
But quantum computing has characteristics that could differ. It requires considerable physical infrastructure investments, very constraining environmental conditions (temperatures close to absolute zero for superconducting architectures), and extremely specialized skills. These barriers to entry slow the emergence of competing alternatives.
China nonetheless has its own internal tensions on this point. A closed ecosystem limits scientific exchanges that have historically accelerated fundamental research. The major breakthroughs in quantum physics over the last twenty years have been largely collaborative: the work of Serge Haroche (2012 Nobel Prize), advances at the Institute for Quantum Computing in Waterloo, cross-publications between European, American, and Chinese groups that built the common foundation of the field. If lock-in logic pushes China to further compartmentalize its research, it risks cutting itself off from cross-pollination that has benefited it thus far.
The alternative scenario is one where China succeeds in maintaining sufficient openness in fundamental research to continue innovating, while locking down commercial and governmental applications. This would be a delicate balance, but not impossible: it would resemble what some countries have practiced in domains like civil nuclear energy, where international scientific cooperation coexists with strict restrictions on applications.
For partners still questioning, the window for action is narrowing. The countries that have maintained their choice autonomy are those that invested early in their own capacities or in alternative alliances. Singapore deliberately diversified its technological partnerships to avoid depending on a single supplier. India is developing its own quantum program with substantial public funding, precisely to preserve strategic maneuvering room.
The true measure of success or failure of the Chinese strategy will be read in the choices Indonesia, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, or Nigeria make by 2028-2030. These countries are still in a window where multiple options coexist. After that, the accounting of platform change risks deciding for them.
Sources
- CSIS China Power Project, https://chinapowerproject.stanford.edu
- Rhodium Group, reports on semiconductors and Chinese technological dependencies (no guaranteed URL)
- 14th five-year plan of the People’s Republic of China (2021-2025), Chinese government
- National Quantum Initiative Act, White House / Congress.gov, https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/6227
- Quantum Flagship, European Commission, https://qt.eu
