Picking a winner and investing almost $1 billion of taxpayer money on something as “iffy” as building a quantum computer is a bold move.

As the federal government would have learnt when last year it bailed out its last quantum computer winner, Silicon Quantum Computing, nobody really knows who’s even going to win the race to build a relatively modest “commercially useful” quantum computer, much less the vastly more powerful “universal” quantum computer everyone is hoping for.