The quantum window is open, but most Singapore companies could miss it

QUANTUM computing has a branding problem. Mention it in a Raffles Place boardroom and half the audience pictures a physics lecture. The other half pictures a gadget that will not be practical for another decade. Both reactions are wrong, and expensive.

Try a different framing: Quantum mechanics already runs through your daily life. The MRI machine that scanned your knee uses it. The GPS that gets you to your next meeting depends on atomic precision that is, at root, quantum. Every laser, from supermarket scanners to the fibre-optic cables, is quantised light at work.

What is new is that the technology is moving out of labs and onto balance sheets, and it is moving faster than most planning cycles can absorb.

One misconception worth dispatching early: Quantum is not going to replace classical computing. It does not need to. It only needs to outperform classical systems on a handful of specific, high-value problems. On those problems, the impact will be enormous.

There is also a tempting assumption that the value clock starts ticking only after current quantum hardware constraints are fully resolved. In reality, value is being created today.

Quantum and quantum-inspired methods are accelerating drug discovery. They are optimising portfolios. They are routing supply chains. All of this is directly relevant to a city whose economy runs on financial services, ports and pharma manufacturing.

Quantum sensing, separately, is enabling navigation without GPS and imaging at resolutions classical instruments cannot match.

Today, more than 2,000 firms operate across quantum hardware, software, sensing and applications. Singapore is well positioned to shape that industry rather than simply import it.

The country has a National Quantum Strategy, the Centre for Quantum Technologies at National University of Singapore, and a Research, Innovation and Enterprise 2030 plan with a S$37 billion commitment.

The signal got louder in February, when QAI Ventures launched its Industry Clusters Program from a new Singapore headquarters with SoftBank and HorizonX, targeting the four verticals where quantum-classical hybrids will land first: financial services, industrials, life sciences and networks.

National infrastructure only pays off if private enterprises plug into it.

If you run a business, the real danger is not that quantum flips your industry next quarter. The real danger is that you miss the window to engage early. In deep tech, early partnerships shape the long-term playing field. They decide who gets access to scarce talent, who sets standards, who builds defensible intellectual property, and who becomes the preferred design partner. The advantage compounds quietly, then suddenly.

The generative artificial intelligence wave is the cautionary tale every executive should keep close. ChatGPT crossed 100 million users in roughly two months. Boards that had spent 2022 putting AI on their “watch list” suddenly found themselves three years behind on talent and posture. Many Singapore firms still are.

Quantum will not unfold in exactly the same shape, but the pattern rhymes. Three lessons stand out.

Talent is the binding constraint: specialists are rare, and demand is outpacing what the universities can produce. Companies that engage early become talent magnets, and that advantage feeds itself.

Timing decides winners: quantum capability is a curve, not a switch; and late movers pay a markup for the same capability while losing strategic optionality.

And the upside is not only speed. It is trust. Quantum-secure communications are quietly becoming a baseline expectation for any organisation handling sensitive data.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore has already flagged the “harvest now, decrypt later” threat, where adversaries collect encrypted data today to crack it once quantum machines mature. For a financial hub, the cryptographic transition is not optional. The clock has already started.

So what should leaders actually do? Stop waiting for certainty. In deep tech, certainty arrives only after the window has closed. Run a sandbox of realistic experiments without forcing immediate return on investment. The point is option value, not a quarterly headline.

Build informed leadership at the top, because sponsorship only happens when senior people understand the landscape well enough to decide. That is exactly why education partnerships like the one HorizonX runs here with MIT Sloan exist.

Collaborate outside your walls. The connective tissue between the Agency for Science, Technology and Research, the universities, Enterprise Singapore and the city’s deep-tech investors are unusually short by global standards. Use it.

Quantum is no longer early in science. It is still early in the market. The companies that move while the gap is open will define the next decade. Those that wait will spend the decade after that catching up.

The writer is associate managing director of QAI Ventures Singapore