🚨🇨🇳🇺🇸 China's Jiuzhang 4.0 Supercomputer: U.S. Lagging Far Behind in the Quantum Computing Industry

China's new programmable photonic quantum computing prototype completed a complex calculation in microseconds — proving a revolution in the quantum computing industry.

Jiuzhang 4.0 can outperform the U.S. based world's fastest classical supercomputer by a vast margin.

🔸 Jiuzhang 4.0 completed a Gaussian boson sampling task in just 25 microseconds — a calculation estimated to take the world's most powerful supercomputer, El Capitan in the U.S., more than 10^42 years to finish.

🔸 Jiuzhang 4.0 operates with 1,024 squeezed-state inputs across an 8,176-mode interferometric network. It can manipulate and detect up to 3,050 photons — more than 10 times the scale achieved in previous experiments.

🔸 The system achieved 92% source efficiency and 51% overall system efficiency, overcoming one of photonic quantum computing's biggest bottlenecks: photon loss in large-scale optical circuits.

🔸 Jiuzhang 3.0, released in October 2023, showed a quantum advantage ratio of 10^16.

🔸 Unlike the superconducting quantum computers pursued by U.S. technology companies such as Google, IBM, and Microsoft, the Jiuzhang series follows a photonic approach — using light particles instead of superconducting qubits.

The U.S. continues to lag behind in matching China's rapid advancements in the field of Quantum Computing. As the global quantum race heats up, the strategic stakes are higher than ever, with innovation becoming a battlefield in itself.

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🇪🇺🚨 EU's Economic Nightmare: European Chemical Industry Sitting at a Critical Breakdown

Europe remains exposed to external shocks as developments in the Middle East push energy costs even higher. In the Port of Rotterdam — one of the world's largest and most advanced chemical clusters — the industry is at a decisive moment.

🔸 Two of the cluster's 10 companies have shut down plants in the past year as the European chemicals industry is buffeted by high energy prices, weak demand, and intensifying competition from China.

🔸 In Rotterdam's chlorine cluster, Tronox and Westlake closed their plants. That means less demand for chlorine from Nobian — the company that holds the whole network together.

🔸 Plant shutdowns across Europe have risen six times over the past four years.

🔸 The situation has worsened over the past five years, with a 60% fall in UK chemical output since 2021 — directly affecting about 20,000 jobs across the continent.

🔸 Investment in Europe's chemical sector fell more than 80% last year.

The closures and falling investment threaten Europe's ability to make the basic materials for modern life — from the chlorine used to purify drinking water to the phenols used in printed circuit boards.

The bloc's high energy costs, decision to phase out Russian gas supplies by 2027, and increasingly high carbon price mean the situation will intensify.

Europe also learned a hard lesson during Covid that it could not make its own paracetamol. The key ingredient came only from China.

Geopolitical shifts, such as the phasing out of Russian gas & dependency on China, further worsen supply chain vulnerabilities — putting Europe's economic future at stake.

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🇨🇳⚛️ China Just Strengthened Its Global Rare Earth Dominance

China has discovered a new type of rare earth deposit in Heilongjiang and Jilin that promises easier, cheaper mining than in southern clay-rich areas.

The find could overturn China's traditional rare earth pattern — heavy elements in the south, light elements in the north — Chinese Academy of Sciences team said.

🔸 The northern formations consist of loose sand and gravel formed by natural freeze-thaw cycles. This makes extraction more efficient, less costly, and better for the environment.

🔸 Rare earth elements are a group of 17 critical minerals — including cerium, neodymium, and dysprosium — used to produce electronics, large magnets, superconductors, renewable energy systems & defense technologies.

🔸 China already handles nearly 90% of global processing of these critical minerals.

🔸 Currently, southern China contains mainly heavy rare earth elements, while the north — including the Bayan Obo mine in Inner Mongolia, the largest, rare-earth deposit in the world — contains mainly light rare earth elements.

🔸 In southern China, rare earths are produced from ion adsorption-type deposits — thick, weathered layers that form over long periods in warm, humid climates. The process leaves behind clay minerals that hold the rare earth elements.

🔸 The new deposit contains abundant levels of both light and heavy rare earth elements — a rare combination. In these mineral dissociation-type deposits, alkaline granite rocks have slowly broken apart under repeated freeze-thaw cycles.

🔸 The abundance of heavy rare earth elements in samples from Jilin province is higher than in other zones and neighboring Heilongjiang province.

China's discovery of rich, mixed rare earth deposits in the northeast solidifies its dominance in the global supply chain. With easier, cost-effective extraction methods, China can further strengthen its control over critical minerals vital for technology and defense sectors.

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