Government Spending on Quantum Technology Is About $3.3 Billion a Year in Plans and Budgets

Governments have announced or budgeted about $3.3 billion a year of public money for quantum technology, counted under one rule and traced to their own documents. The United States, Germany and the United Kingdom lead. China, which may spend more than any of them, publishes nothing that can be checked. Government spending on quantum technology is easy to announce and hard to add up. Ministers quote envelopes that run for four, eight or ten years, and some of them quietly include private money, European money or sums never confirmed outside a press release. We gathered 68 programme lines from budget papers, ministry releases and laws. Then we kept only the money a reader can trace to a government source. The answer is about $3.3 billion a year, most of it announced or budgeted rather than proven spent. That is consistent with the best-known global count, if that count is spread over time. McKinsey found about $42 billion of public quantum money announced by April 2024. Take out China’s estimated $15.3 billion and spread the rest over eight to ten years, and it comes to about $2.7 billion to $3.3 billion a year. That span runs back to Britain’s 2014 programme,…