IBM forges ahead with quantum push in Asia

“Quantum, the third transformative technology shift, is coming. If you’re an optimist I would say it’s here in two years. If you’re a pessimist, I would say it’s in four years.”

IBM is pushing through with its quantum technology strategy and laying the groundwork to get Asia Pacific customers on board the quantum journey. This, at a time when APAC enterprises are still juggling AI and transformation priorities.

“If AI redefines what we are doing today, quantum will redefine what's going to happen tomorrow,” said Ana Paula Assis, senior vice president and chair for IBM Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific at IBM Think Singapore.

“Quantum and AI are not competing technologies; they are convergent technologies. AI learns from existing knowledge, while quantum computing unlocks new knowledge, new discoveries […] quantum uncovers what AI can yet compute. Then AI learns from what quantum discovers and that's the flywheel.”

While IBM showcased similar strategies — on agentic AI, sovereign cloud, and AI as an operating model — in its Singapore stop of the vendor’s annual Think event tour, the push for quantum tech adoption amongst APAC customers and partners stood out.

“Quantum, the third transformative technology shift, is coming,” said Hans Dekkers, general manager at IBM APAC in a media briefing. “If you’re an optimist I would say it’s here in two years. If you’re a pessimist, I would say it’s in four years.”

Dekker suggested that enterprise leaders make simple decisions about data to enable quantum-safe environments, even as they figure out how to manage competing investment priorities.

“Every time a CIO makes a data decision where he or she stores the data, they could ask themselves: How do I encrypt the data?” said Dekker.

He went on to share that IBM’s data storage system has the option to enable quantum-safe cryptography, which means that the data stored today will be encrypted by algorithms and protected for the foreseeable future.

“This is one of the ways to safeguard the data that exists today with quantum-safe cryptography, so even if the machines are not here yet, we do urge everyone to encrypt their data today,” he said.

“If you look at the Singapore context, I think the government certainly recognizes the threat that quantum computing-based encryption [has] in our day-to-day lives. That is why the Infocomm Media Development Authority launched quite a number of quantum security initiatives.”

In the same media session, Jesse Chao, Foxconn’s head of AI and quantum computing, Corporate Business Development at the chairman office, shared how he sees AI converging with quantum tech in the near future.

“It is only three and a half years since [AI] launch […] but the impact is totally different — it has systematically changed [many] verticals,” said Chao. “We see these huge demands here but also huge amounts of headlines.

“[With] quantum, everyone thinks it should be next, so it’s also one way to accelerate quantum computing, but the other way is quantum computing will also help us [with the issue of] power consumption […] We found out quantum computing might help with some of these use cases that can have much lower energy consumption, but also solve some problems that classical computing can never do.

“We are trying to discover the possibilities with IBM about how we can accelerate this pre-training progress because it still takes a huge amount of time […] We can see AI and quantum computing merging in a way to find the best way to optimize use cases.”