Defence And UK Quantum: Who Buys, Who Builds, And What Has Been Tested

In May 2023 the Royal Navy tested a quantum sensor aboard one of its ships, in a pod built to be swapped out, and the Ministry of Defence has gone on testing British quantum hardware ever since. It has published no order to buy any of it in numbers. Searched for the word quantum and for a brain scanner’s sensors, Contracts Finder lists ten defence awards since 2022, worth about £4.3 million, and the largest of them paid for that one scanner. In May 2023 the Royal Navy and Imperial College London tested a quantum accelerometer in a pod aboard XV Patrick Blackett. The pod, one of a set of swap-in bays that QinetiQ designed so devices could come and go, is still the best short picture of UK quantum defence work. At least twelve field tests of quantum hardware with the forces, Dstl or a defence firm have been published since 2023. Yet the ministry has published no order to buy any of it in numbers. What it has bought since 2022 is a photonic computer and a mobile quantum brain scanner, one machine of each. Not every trial reports, either, since Infleqtion’s Q-NAV sea trial, planned for 2025,…