IBM and Google have announced investments totaling $150 million to the University of Chicago and the University of Tokyo to accelerate progress in U.S.-Japan quantum-computing research.

The collaborative investments were announced to coincide with the meeting of the Group of Seven (G7) nations in Hiroshima, Japan, last week and are viewed as part of a larger U.S.-led partnership with Japan and Western European nations intended to counter China’s investments in quantum computing, which have implications for security and economic growth. IBM will provide $50 million to each university with the aim of building a quantum-centric supercomputer in the next 10 years that leverages the company’s quantum processing technology. Google is contributing $25 million to each university and will share its quantum computers with university scientists as part of a long-term research partnership.

With quantum computers “[y]ou could do something in an evening that would have taken six months in a lab,” IBM chief executive Arvind Krishna told theWall Street Journal, suggesting as examples that researchers could identify solutions for sequestering carbon from the burning of fossil fuels or optimizing electric vehicle batteries on the atomic level.

A qubit is the basic unit of quantum information. Google estimates that a useful quantum computer would need a million qubits, an increase from the hundreds available on quantum computers today, Charina Chou, Google Quantum AI COO told the Journal. “We have four orders of magnitude to go on the quantity, we have four orders of magnitude to go roughly on the quality, so it’s going to be a hard problem.”

(Photo credit: Getty Images/D Kosig)