McKinsey & Company wrote in June 2022 that China had announced $15.3 billion in public funding for quantum technology, more than any other country and over twice the total of EU governments. Think tanks, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and a House committee chairman have repeated the figure since.
McKinsey cited a 2021 report by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). CIFAR listed ¥100 billion over five years for the construction and operation of China’s national quantum laboratory in Hefei and converted it to $15.3 billion. Quantum Observer found no Chinese budget document published through November 2026, in the Chinese and English sources it searched, that confirms the figure, so it should be cited as McKinsey’s 2022 estimate of announced funding, never as what China spent.
Rep. Frank Lucas, then chairman of the House Science Committee, told a hearing in June 2023, without naming a source, that China “is investing more than $15 billion in quantum research and development.” McKinsey had described the figure as announced funding spread over five years.
Disclosure: Quantum Observer’s Editor-in-Chief Marin Ivezic is the founder and CEO of Applied Quantum, a quantum systems integration and consulting firm.
Where the number came from
CIFAR published “A Quantum Revolution: Report on Global Policies for Quantum Technology” in April 2021. In the report’s China profile, its authors, Johnny Kung and Muriam Fancy, wrote that “Government funding for the construction and operation of NQL is ¥100B (US$15.3B) over five years.” NQL was the report’s abbreviation for the National Quantum Laboratory in Hefei.
Kung and Fancy listed 14 sources for the China profile, from Canadian Security Intelligence Service and Jamestown Foundation analyses to Chinese government pages and news articles. They did not say which of the 14 sources they took the yuan figure from.
The yuan amount had appeared six months earlier, attached to something broader. In October 2020, Stephen Chen of the South China Morning Post wrote that the Hefei facility had been designated the headquarters of China’s national quantum program. Citing state media without naming the outlet, he wrote that investment in the program “will reach 100 billion yuan” by 2022.
Chen converted the same sum to $14.8 billion in his October 2020 article. CIFAR converted at about ¥6.54 per dollar to reach $15.3 billion, so it did not take its dollar figure from the SCMP.
Published figures for the laboratory itself span a factor of 15 and do not measure the same thing. MIT Technology Review described it in December 2018 as “a $1 billion National Laboratory for Quantum Information Sciences.” Analysts at the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS) in Berlin wrote in December 2024 that construction of the laboratory started with ¥7 billion and that “there is no public information on its yearly operational budget.”
The OECD wrote in December 2025 that “actual investment expenditures have not been reported” for the laboratory. In the same sentence, it wrote that the government “has announced up to USD 15 billion to develop the laboratory.”
How McKinsey used it
In its June 2022 Quantum Technology Monitor, McKinsey named the CIFAR report and a June 2021 press search as the sources of its public-funding chart. McKinsey labeled the chart “Not exhaustive” and footnoted that it showed “Total historic announced funding,” with timelines that vary by country.
Across its documents that year, McKinsey described the number in four ways. In the Monitor’s text, the firm called it “reported large government investment (estimated at $15.3 billion).” On another page, it wrote that China “has committed” $15 billion over five years for quantum technology. On a page about China, marked “Preliminary” and sourced to the Chinese company database IT Orange and a press search, McKinsey put about $15 billion for quantum technology “as part of China’s 14th five-year plan.”
In its June 15 article, McKinsey wrote that China, as part of its 14th five-year plan for quantum technology, “has announced the most public funding to date of any country.” In a chart published on September 13, 2022, the firm wrote that China “has committed $15.3 billion in public funds in quantum computing investments.”
The Monitor’s footnote on the limits of Chinese data concerned private money. In it, McKinsey warned that “Data availability on start-up funding in China is limited” and that “actual investment is likely higher.” In its methodology section, McKinsey described how it compiled start-up deals from PitchBook data but gave no method for the public-funding figures.
McKinsey kept the figure in later editions. In April 2023, the firm repeated it in an article, writing that China’s “total announced investment of $15.3 billion” remained “the highest in the world, even without an additional commitment this year.” In its June 2025 Monitor, McKinsey wrote that China “has boosted government funding for quantum research and development to over $15B.”
In the same 2025 edition, McKinsey excluded a “$136B announced investment toward emerging technologies” because its relevance to quantum technology was unclear. The firm also noted “Limited transparency on commercial activity in China.”
McKinsey repeated both notes in its April 2026 Monitor. Under a chart of government announcements from 2023 to 2025, the firm added in the same note that “the ~$15B investment is not shown here, as it was announced before 2023.”
McKinsey’s strongest defense is its own labeling. The firm called the figure announced, estimated, preliminary, and not exhaustive, and it named its source. McKinsey used both “estimated” and “committed” in its June 2022 Monitor. In its September 2022 chart, the firm wrote only that China “has committed $15.3 billion.”
How the figure spread
The table lists nine uses of the figure from 2023 to 2026, with the source each one gave. The users include the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), the European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE), Harvard’s Belfer Center, and The Quantum Insider.
| Who | When | What they wrote or said | Source given |
|---|---|---|---|
| CSIS ChinaPower Project | August 2023, updated January 2024 | “McKinsey estimates that as of 2022, the Chinese government has announced a total of $15.3 billion in funding” | McKinsey, April 2023 |
| Rep. Frank Lucas, House Science Committee chairman | June 7, 2023 | China “is investing more than $15 billion in quantum research and development” | None |
| ITIF | September 2024 | “China claims over $15 billion in public quantum funding” | McKinsey’s September 2022 chart in an endnote and its April 2024 Monitor in Figure 4 |
| MERICS | December 2024 | China “has stepped up government spending on scientific and industrial development to about USD 15 billion” | None for that sentence |
| CSIS Perspectives on Innovation | February 2025 | “China’s announced government investment in quantum technology as of 2023 is $15.3 billion” | McKinsey graph from its April 2024 Monitor |
| ECIPE | March 2025 | “China leads in public investment (USD 15 billion)” | None |
| Belfer Center | May 2025 | China’s government investment “is reported to be approximately $15 billion” | None named |
| OECD | December 2025 | The government “has announced up to USD 15 billion to develop the laboratory” | None shown |
| The Quantum Insider | April 2026 | China’s government investment “is widely cited at approximately $15 billion” | “CSIS, McKinsey, and others,” with no document named |
Several users dropped McKinsey’s word “announced.” Lucas said China “is investing.” In its key takeaways, ITIF wrote that China “claims” the funding.
A later claim in Congress cannot be traced to the figure at all. Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, the ranking member of the House Science Committee, told a hearing in January 2026 that “in 2024, the Chinese Communist Party invested more than four times the United States in quantum R&D.” She gave no source and no dollar figure in her statement, so readers cannot tell which estimate, if any, she used.
The MERICS analysts, Antonia Hmaidi and Jeroen Groenewegen-Lau, attributed a different number to McKinsey. They wrote that “we have not been able to verify the USD 150 billion amount that McKinsey reported on the basis of a non-public 14th Five-Year Plan for Quantum Technology (2021–2025),” citing McKinsey’s June 2022 article.
That article contains no $150 billion figure. In it, McKinsey gave $15.3 billion, which it said China announced “as part of its 14th five-year plan for quantum technology (2021–2025).” The amount MERICS attributed to McKinsey is about ten times that figure.
What China’s own documents contain
China’s government named quantum technology a priority in its 14th Five-Year Plan, adopted in March 2021, in at least five passages ranging from national laboratories to military-civil cooperation, with no quantum funding figure. In the outline of the 15th Five-Year Plan, which the National People’s Congress approved in March 2026, the government called for quantum technology to become a new source of economic growth and named it among strategic research fields, again with no amount.
China’s Ministry of Science and Technology publishes budgets for individual programs, one call at a time. In its 2017 call for the Quantum Control and Quantum Information key special project, the ministry offered ¥1 billion in central funds across 18 research directions, for projects that generally last five years. In the 2018 call, the ministry offered ¥300 million across 12 directions and reported 55 projects funded in 2016 and 2017.
China announced a national venture guidance fund in March 2025. CSIS researchers Hideki Tomoshige and Phillip Singerman wrote in January 2026 that its total scale “will approach 1 trillion yuan ($138 billion),” with quantum technology among its focuses. They also noted a $1.4 billion quantum industry fund that Anhui province launched in 2017. In September 2026, The Quantum Insider reported, citing the National Bureau of Asian Research, that three regional funds under the national fund had raised ¥121.8 billion and that “China has not disclosed how much of the money will be allocated specifically to quantum technology.”
Quantum Observer found program-level calls, plans without amounts, and funds that span several technologies, but no national quantum total that could confirm or replace McKinsey’s figure.
What analysts and officials have said
RAND researchers questioned Chinese funding figures four months before McKinsey published its Monitor. In February 2022, Edward Parker and 10 co-authors wrote that “Chinese reports of total government R&D funding for quantum technology are wildly conflicting.” They added that “we cannot determine from public sources whether the Chinese government is spending more or less” than the U.S. government in quantum technology.
In March 2023, Kevin Klyman, a Belfer Center researcher, wrote in Foreign Policy that Lu Chao-Yang of the University of Science and Technology of China had “no idea” how the rumor began that China had spent $15 billion on quantum computing. Klyman quoted Lu as saying that “the actual money is maybe 25 percent of that,” without saying where Lu made the remark.
At the June 2023 hearing where Lucas cited the figure, Celia Merzbacher, executive director of the Quantum Economic Development Consortium, testified that “China is investing a lot.” She added that “Some reports say $15 billion” and called them “hard numbers to verify.”
Parker told the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission in February 2024 that the United States and China “probably invest far more government funding into quantum R&D” than other nations. He added that China “has produced widely conflicting public numbers for its investment levels.”
CSIS’s ChinaPower Project, which cited McKinsey’s number, also wrote that “Exact figures are not available” and that “these figures are not uniformly accepted.” It cited a range of $4–17 billion from The Quantum Insider.
The ECIPE authors who led with “USD 15 billion” wrote that “estimating the exact scope of government funding for technology development in China is challenging.” For their low-end figure, “as low as USD 4 billion,” they cited a February 2024 Breaking Defense article. Breaking Defense reported that Heather Penney of the Mitchell Institute had cited McKinsey’s figure of more than $15 billion and then acknowledged that “maybe Beijing has only invested $4 billion.”
The case for the figure
The figure’s strongest defense is that Beijing discloses too little for anyone to replace it with a better one. A November 2025 staff research report for the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission said that Beijing “is highly secretive about most of its quantum research.”
Analysts who doubt the figure’s precision still judge China’s public spending to be large. The MERICS analysts, who could not verify McKinsey’s numbers, judged that China “is likely to outspend Europe, where British, German, French, EU and Dutch pledges add up to USD 12 billion.”
Lu’s lower estimate has weaknesses of its own, starting with its sourcing. Klyman did not say where or when Lu made the remark.
On that evidence, the $15.3 billion can be cited as one estimate of scale, dated and attributed, but not as a measured total.
How to cite it
To cite the number defensibly, writers can name the source and the date, as in “McKinsey’s 2022 estimate of announced Chinese public funding, $15.3 billion, converted from a ¥100 billion figure that CIFAR reported in 2021 for the Hefei national laboratory,” and link to McKinsey’s Monitor. McKinsey itself dated the figure to before 2023 in its April 2026 Monitor.
What would settle it
Israel and the United States publish the kind of document that would let outsiders check a national figure. The authors of a review that Israel’s Innovation Authority published in October 2026 compared a planned allocation of about $413 million for the national program’s first phase with estimated spending of about $409 million, agency by agency, as Quantum Observer reported in its article on the review. Their estimate includes expected cost-sharing by industry and academia.
U.S. agencies separate planned funding from appropriations in their own documents. In its Quantum Genesis Q Competition, the Energy Department identified $2.5 million of up to $215 million as fiscal 2026 money, as Quantum Observer reported in its article on the competition.
This reading would be overturned if the document behind the ¥100 billion figure were published with its breakdown. A national quantum total from Chinese authorities would give a better current estimate without settling where the 2021 figure came from. Anyone citing $15.3 billion in 2030, the final year of China’s 15th Five-Year Plan, would be citing announcements that CIFAR reported in 2021 and McKinsey adopted in 2022.
An earlier version of this analysis appeared on PostQuantum.com, the author’s own publication, on April 3, 2026. It is republished here with permission and was revised and updated for Quantum Observer in November 2026.
