Singapore cannot wait for AI clarity before betting on quantum

Singapore cannot park quantum computing until it has finished making sense of artificial intelligence, two SGTech leaders argue in a CNA Tech commentary. Gavin Chua and Gunasekharan Chellappan make the case for running both tracks at once, treating AI as today's necessity and quantum as the edge that could define the next decade.

Their argument arrives while local employers are still working out how to absorb AI. Staff are experimenting on their own initiative, but few organisations have built structure around adoption, and the sprawl of available tools leaves managers second-guessing their choices. The writers anchor their case in the Economic Strategy Review, which asks Singapore to widen its lead in established strengths while still betting boldly on frontier fields.

Semiconductors are the template. Texas Instruments opened its first plant here in 1968, and the early emphasis fell on factories, infrastructure and trained people rather than waiting for a homegrown chip cluster to materialise. The authors see that same logic applying to quantum, with cybersecurity as the most immediate pressure point: any organisation holding sensitive records across decades must migrate to encryption that future machines cannot break, which they cast as routine long-horizon risk management, not a research curiosity.

They also resist treating the two technologies as separate silos. Pattern-spotting across vast datasets is where AI shines; optimisation and simulation are where quantum, if it matures, could deliver dramatic speed-ups. Those are precisely the workloads that increasingly tangled trade routes and cargo scheduling throw at Singapore's shipping and logistics players, so the premium shifts to people who straddle technical depth and industry know-how. Nothing here obliges a small firm to buy quantum hardware tomorrow, since agencies, universities, investors and trade bodies are expected to carry different pieces of the ecosystem.

Why it matters for Singapore: The country has long grown by commercialising what works today while seeding bets on what might matter tomorrow, and how it funds and coordinates quantum work will show whether that instinct survives the AI rush. For companies, post-quantum security and quantum-aware hiring are sliding into mainstream planning rather than staying a specialist niche, and with the Economic Strategy Review setting direction, support is likely to favour shared platforms and testing grounds over yet more standalone tools.