The Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation announced it was nearly doubling the annual budget of the Wallenberg Centre for Quantum Technology (WACQT) from SEK 45 million to SEK 80 million (approximately USD 9.4 million) per year for the coming four years. According to the foundation’s announcement, the investment had also been extended from its original ten years to twelve, bringing total funding to at least SEK 1.3 billion (approximately USD 153 million) including contributions from industry and participating universities.
Peter Wallenberg Jr, chair of the foundation, said WACQT had “built up a qualified research environment, established collaborations with Swedish industry and succeeded in developing qubits with proven problem-solving ability.” A milestone had been reached in 2020 when WACQT researchers solved a small part of a real-world optimization problem using a two-qubit quantum computer. The increased funding was intended to enable a scale-up in the number of qubits and expanded efforts in software and algorithm development.