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Does China’s Jiuzhang 4.0 computer herald the age of quantum supremacy?

China has unveiled its latest photonic quantum computer, Jiuzhang 4.0, with researchers saying it can outperform the world’s fastest classical supercomputer by a vast margin,…

By Samantha Johnson / May 15, 2026
China has unveiled its latest photonic quantum computer, Jiuzhang 4.0, with researchers saying it can outperform the world’s fastest classical supercomputer by a vast margin, further strengthening Beijing’s push towards quantum supremacy.
The results, published on May 13 in the peer-reviewed journal Nature, mark the latest milestone in China’s rapidly advancing quantum programme led by a team of scientists at the University of Science and Technology of China headed by renowned Chinese quantum physicist Pan Jianwei.
Quantum physicist Pan Jianwei leads the University of Science and Technology of China team behind Jiuzhang 4.0, the country’s latest photonic quantum computer. Photo: Soho
Quantum physicist Pan Jianwei leads the University of Science and Technology of China team behind Jiuzhang 4.0, the country’s latest photonic quantum computer. Photo: Soho

Jiuzhang 4.0 completed a Gaussian boson sampling task in just 25 microseconds – a calculation they estimated would take the world’s most powerful supercomputer, El Capitan in the United States, a mind-boggling more than 10^42 years to finish, according to the university in the eastern city of Hefei.

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A Gaussian boson sampling task is a quantum computing task that is computationally difficult for classical computers to handle.

“No realistic classical computing resources, to our knowledge, can bring the MPS [matrix product state] algorithm anywhere near the accuracy achieved by our experiment,” the team said in a press release.

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

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