Quantum 201: US v China Quantum Industrial Base

Constanza Vidal Bustamante joins Chris Miller and Zachary Yerushalmi to break down her new report with John Burke, Quantum's Industrial Moment: Strengthening US Quantum Supply Chains for Scalable Advantage — a deep dive into the components, chokepoints, and policy levers that will decide who wins the race to a fault-tolerant quantum computer.

We discuss…

• (00:00) Why quantum is "pre-transistor" — and why the US still has time to lock in supply chain dominance before the next-gen architecture is even invented
• (09:53) Dilution refrigerators, helium-3 from the nuclear stockpile, and whether mining the moon is actually a viable Plan B
• (17:43) Did the 2024 export controls backfire? Inside the case study of China going from zero to dominating dilution-refrigerator publications in two years
• (48:44) Lasers, photonics, and the Chinese supplier that reverse-engineered a Danish flagship — and is still selling into US labs under R&D tariff exemptions
• (1:03:45) Why quantum looks more like biotech than semiconductors: 90 companies, ~7 modalities, and the anthropology of an industry where everyone thinks their qubit is the right one

Constanza's report: https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/quantums-industrial-moment

The Quantum Throne song: https://suno.com/s/9kBx74ZqUHsgYiQ2

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