China's quantum programme

The scientific hub

China’s quantum computing programme is organised around a single scientific centre and a widening circle of commercial spinouts. The hub is the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Hefei, where the groups led by Pan Jianwei and Lu Chaoyang have produced two distinct hardware lines: the Jiuzhang photonic machines and the Zuchongzhi superconducting processors. The superconducting line gives the clearest measure of progress, moving from 62 qubits in 2021 to 105 in 2024 and 107 in 2025. Read together, these efforts make China quantum computing a genuinely national undertaking rather than the work of any one company.

The commercial champion

The commercial flagship is Origin Quantum, a USTC spinout based in the same city. Its Origin Wukong processor, a 72-qubit machine launched in January 2024, has been made available over the cloud and reports more than 20 million visits and around 339,000 completed jobs, a level of access unusual for hardware this early. The company has since pushed to a 180-qubit Wukong-180 in 2026, developed Tianji 4.0 control electronics rated to support more than 500 qubits, and in February 2026 released Origin Pilot, described as the first publicly downloadable quantum operating system. It is reported to be targeting a $950m listing on Shanghai’s STAR Market. A separate machine, Tianyan-504, reached 504 qubits in 2024, underlining how quickly China’s quantum computing sector is scaling qubit counts.

State backing

State backing sits underneath all of this, and the recent policy signals are emphatic. The 15th Five-Year Plan covering 2026 to 2030, adopted in March, names quantum first among seven designated future industries. It is supported by a National Venture Guidance Fund that allocates CNY 121.8bn across three regional investment vehicles. Private capital has followed: the tracker IT Juzi counted 150 financing events worth CNY 11.2bn by mid-March 2026, with the first quarter of 2026 alone reaching CNY 2.2bn, close to the CNY 2.5bn recorded for the whole of 2025, a single quarter nearly matching an entire prior year and a sign of how sharply domestic investor appetite has turned towards the sector. Total government investment in China quantum computing is widely cited at around $15bn, a figure that includes the Hefei National Laboratory campus that anchors the effort physically.

The full domestic stack

The picture is broader than computing hardware alone. QuantumCTek, which listed on the STAR Market in 2020, operates what are described as the largest quantum communication networks anywhere, extending China’s strength into the secure-communications side of the field. CIQTEK supplies the scientific instruments that a maturing research base depends on. Around these sit the various USTC groups and their suppliers, giving China quantum computing an unusually complete domestic stack, from measurement instruments through processors to networks and software.

That domestic depth is partly a response to external pressure. Origin Quantum has been on the US entity list since May 2024, restricting its access to American technology and components. Rather than stalling the programme, the listing has reinforced the emphasis on home-grown control electronics, software and instruments, which is why so many of the recent announcements stress domestically developed systems such as Tianji and Origin Pilot.

What to watch

Taken as a whole, China’s quantum computing effort is notable less for any single record-breaking qubit count than for its breadth and its patience. The combination of a dominant academic centre, a stock-market-bound commercial champion, a state plan that ranks quantum first among future industries, and a full domestic supply chain describes a programme built for the long term. What to watch next is whether Origin Quantum completes its STAR Market listing, whether the qubit-count gains translate into demonstrations of real computational advantage, and how far the entity-list restrictions push the sector towards full self-sufficiency. For the wider field, see our quantum explainers and the main quantum hub.