This time, Chinese scientists have left the rest of the world in the dust.
On May 13, 2026, the top international journal Nature dropped a bombshell. A team led by Pan Jianwei and Lu Chaoyang from the University of Science and Technology of China, together with several other top-tier Chinese research institutions, has successfully built a next-generation photonic quantum computer prototype: Jiuzhang 4.0.
The global tech world went absolutely nuts.
Why? Because the number is so absurd it breaks your brain: it’s 10 to the power of 54 times faster than El Capitan, the world’s most powerful supercomputer.
Let’s try to write that out: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
You can’t even read that. No word exists for a number that big.
Let me put it in a way that makes sense. If you gave El Capitan – a multi-hundred-million-dollar beast that takes up an entire building and needs its own power plant – the same task that Jiuzhang 4.0 just crushed, it would need over 10⁴² years. For perspective, the entire universe has only been around for about 13.8 billion years. We’re off by dozens of orders of magnitude.
And Jiuzhang 4.0? It did the job in 25 microseconds.
Blink and you’ll miss it.
The Photon Maze: How on Earth is This Thing So Fast?
To get why Jiuzhang 4.0 is such a monster, you first need to understand one thing: it’s not the same species as the chip in your phone or the laptop on your desk.
Imagine a traditional computer like a hyper-diligent delivery guy. He can only carry one package at a time, but he runs insanely fast, billions of trips per second. Looks impressive. Now, a quantum computer? It doesn’t run at all. It teleports.
In the quantum world, there’s a magical property called superposition. A classical bit is either 0 or 1. Pick one. A quantum bit? It can be 0 and 1 at the same time. This means every time you add one more qubit, your computing power doesn’t just double – it explodes exponentially.
Here’s what Jiuzhang 4.0 pulled off: it successfully manipulated and detected up to 3,050 photons. Look at this glow-up:
- 2020, Jiuzhang: 76 photons, quantum advantage of 10⁵
- 2021, Jiuzhang 2.0: 113 photons, quantum advantage of 10¹⁰
- 2023, Jiuzhang 3.0: 255 photons, quantum advantage of 10¹⁶
- 2026, Jiuzhang 4.0: 3,050 photons, quantum advantage of 10⁵⁴
In just six years, photon count jumped from 76 to 3,050 – a 40x increase. The computational power went from 10⁵ to 10⁵⁴. That’s not linear growth; that’s riding a rocket to Mars with the pedal to the floor.
The team uses a brilliant analogy: picture a massive 3D maze with 8,176 exits. 3,050 photons are all running, colliding, and interfering inside this maze at the same instant. Every possible path is a potential computing channel. When these photons simultaneously navigate the maze and “assemble” at the exits in a specific pattern, bam – a complex quantum calculation is done.
A classical computer? It has to check each exit, each path, one by one. That’s the root of the quantum smackdown – the sheer dimensionality of parallel processing is in a whole different universe.
Not the “Supremacy” You’re Thinking Of
Don’t let the term “quantum supremacy” spook you. This isn’t some sci-fi Skynet scenario.
“Quantum supremacy,” more accurately called “quantum computational advantage,” simply means: on a specific, well-defined math problem, a quantum computer can genuinely outrun the absolute fastest classical supercomputer on the planet.
It’s not an all-around beatdown, and it definitely doesn’t mean a quantum computer can do everything. Jiuzhang 4.0 is still what we call a “special-purpose quantum simulator.” Its sweet spot is solving something called the Gaussian boson sampling problem – in plain English, calculating the probability distribution of a bunch of photons popping out of different exits after passing through a complicated optical setup.
What’s that good for? In the near term, stuff like pattern recognition, machine learning, and graph theory calculations. Looking further down the road, it’s a critical stepping stone towards fault-tolerant quantum computing, useful for generating quantum error-correction codes and large-scale entangled cluster states.
In other words, Jiuzhang 4.0 is not a general-purpose quantum computer you can fire up to play games. That goal is still a ways off. But what it proves is massive: the insane potential of quantum computing is real, it’s operational, and it’s not just theory on a chalkboard.
So What’s China’s Secret Sauce?
There are four main race tracks in quantum computing: superconducting, photonic, trapped ions, and neutral atoms.
China is currently the only country on Earth that has achieved “quantum computational advantage” on two of the most important tracks – both photonic and superconducting.
On the photonic side, we have the Jiuzhang family. On the superconducting side, there’s the Zuchongzhi series – Zuchongzhi 2.0 hit 56 qubits in 2021, and Zuchongzhi 3.0 reached 105 qubits in 2025.
Walking on two legs, and both legs are sprinting in first place.
Think back to 2019. Google made worldwide headlines when its 53-qubit superconducting processor Sycamore declared “quantum supremacy.” But then Chinese scientists came along with smarter classical algorithms and, on a supercomputer, crunched Google’s supposedly 10,000-year task in just tens of seconds, while using 15 times less energy. They basically popped Google’s supremacy bubble.
Since then, the baton of leadership in this field has quietly passed to China.
In 2022, Canada’s Xanadu, together with the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, unveiled the 216-photon “Borealis” processor, becoming the second team globally to demonstrate quantum advantage on an optical system. And that was impressive – but Jiuzhang 4.0, with its 3,050 photons, just stretched the gap into astronomical territory.
The Scientists Behind the Scenes
When people talk about quantum computing in China, the first name that usually pops up is Pan Jianwei, the visionary at the center of it all. But the guy who’s really been in the trenches, leading the team through blood, sweat, and tears, is a young scientist they call the “quantum wunderkind” – Lu Chaoyang.
Back in 2014, Google announced a billion-dollar moonshot with hundreds of scientists aiming to build the world’s first quantum computer within five years. At that time, Lu Chaoyang, just 31 years old, was heading a tiny team of a dozen people with only a few million yuan in funding, chasing the exact same goal.
“We chose a different route,” Lu later recalled. “We went with photons. China already had a very strong foundation in this area.”
His core team back then? A bunch of post-95 graduate students.
It was these young guns who, under near-impossible conditions, clawed their way from 5 photons to 6 photons over two agonizing years, and eventually all the way to today’s 3,050-photon Jiuzhang 4.0.
Going from 5 photons to 6 meant doubling the space – at the time, that was an excruciating struggle. Now, jumping from 255 to 3,050 photons, a tenfold increase, has sent computational power into the stratosphere. Every single step of China’s quantum journey has been hard-won.
Is the Quantum Era Actually Here?
Alright, let’s get to the real question: when will a quantum computer walk into our everyday lives?
Let’s keep it real: there’s still a long road ahead.
Quantum states are absurdly fragile. The slightest vibration, a tiny temperature change, even the act of measurement itself can cause “decoherence” – meaning the quantum magic vanishes and your calculation collapses instantly.
Quantum error correction is the master key to unlocking universal quantum computing. The good news? This tech has been making huge leaps recently. Some research outfits now estimate that a large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computer, once thought to be a 2040 thing, might actually emerge around 2030.
Jiuzhang 4.0’s breakthrough isn’t just about that ridiculous 10⁵⁴x speed flex. Its deeper meaning is that it proves the feasibility of large-scale, low-loss photonic quantum processors, paving the road for future fault-tolerant photonic quantum computers.
Think of it like this: what we have right now is the quantum equivalent of ENIAC – the world’s very first general-purpose electronic computer. It was huge, single-purpose, and could only solve specific problems. But it proved the path was walkable. And less than 80 years after ENIAC, we’re all carrying smartphones in our pockets.
The curtain on the quantum computing age is being lifted.
And this time, the Chinese are standing center stage.
10 to the power of 54 is not the finish line. It’s the starting pistol.
When future historians look back at 2026, they might just write this line: in that year, quantum computing shed its lab-coat fantasy and truly crossed the last threshold into the realm of “practicality.”
And we are the ones witnessing that history, right now.