Since 2018, Israel has been actively fighting to stay at the forefront of the quantum computing arms race.
Much like the space race of 60-70 years ago, the winners will establish all new power and influence on the military, economic, and scientific fronts.
Jerusalem must show some modesty. The real race for quantum supremacy is between the US and China.
Whichever country wins may be able to outcompete the other across a range of detection issues related to fighter jets and submarines.
They may also suddenly be able to crack all passwords and codes that are not quantum-resistant, which, as of now, is almost all passwords, including almost anything on the World Wide Web.
But whether Israel finishes in the top five or is pushed out of the top 10 in the quantum computing race remains wide open and could have significant consequences.
In all of this, Israel is working hard to form partnerships with other countries that are investing heavily in quantum.
For example, from 2021-2024, Israeli companies received more than €1.1 billion from Horizon Europe as part of a broader joint effort with the EU on a range of scientific challenges.
No other country or group of countries has come close to investing that kind of foreign capital in Israeli quantum efforts.
Looking at the full picture, the US invests far more in Israeli national security than Europe, including investments in the Iron Dome, the F-35, and several other joint projects.
But specifically for quantum computing, Washington's investment has been underwhelming.
On December 11, AIPAC celebrated the US investing $47.5 million in Israel across a range of technology areas, of which quantum computing was just one.
That means the EU has likely invested between 20 and 200 times as much as the US government in Israeli quantum computing.
Add to all of this uncertainty about the future of Israeli-EU relations following many traditional European allies putting on certain embargoes on Israeli weapons in 2025, as well as uncertainty about whether the Trump administration’s “America First” mantra could at some point reduce aid to the Jewish state, and Jerusalem could be facing a perfect storm.
Some Israeli quantum experts who understand the ups and downs of US-Israeli relations are also concerned about a school of American thought that remains wary of sharing certain technological secrets with Israel due to issues in prior eras.
This is not a recent experience, but in an area like quantum computing, where the rules of the game are not yet set, and competition is fierce, it cannot be ignored.
Enter stage left: Hadas Lorber, formerly serving on Israel’s National Security Council and in other roles for around a quarter-century, now heading the US-Israeli relations program at the INSS think tank.
Lorber is on a mission to help Israel build up and secure future funding and relationships in the quantum domain wherever possible.
In July, Lorber headlined an unprecedented quantum computing conference at INSS, with top Israeli and American quantum officials appearing alongside many of Israel’s private-sector and academic-sector quantum deans.
The idea was to help brainstorm and strategize how Israel could best move forward in the quantum domain.
In an interview, Lorber told The Jerusalem Post that the “interest in quantum computing started at a basic level” already in the 1950s. “But the quantum revolution only started in the last decade. The Israel National Quantum Initiative was unveiled in 2018 with a budget of NIS 1.25 billion.”
In 2020, the budget went up to NIS 1.5 billion, and in 2022, another NIS 200 million was put in the pot toward academic and private sector quantum endeavors.
INSS’s quantum program started in 2024 with Dr. Yehoshua Klisky’s paper.
Next, INSS executive director Tamir Hayman pressed for building an entire staff and program around quantum computing.
Lorber had led the NSC’s cooperation with the US on quantum issues, which began formally with the Jerusalem Declaration of 2022, in partnership with the Defense Ministry’s MAFAT research organization.
Israel has been a member of the Horizon Europe research program since December 2021, becoming the first non-European associate member.
Since October 2023, Israel has been a member of the EuroHPC JU, which focuses on supercomputers and quantum computers.
As of 2025, MAFAT official Nadav Cohen said that Israel’s 144 academic groups related to quantum had jumped to 240, and its five companies had jumped to 20.
On December 23, Hayman gave a speech saying that Israel needed to be razor-focused on “deep technology and national security – quantum and all technologies, and AI, and the integration of those aspects into the world of security and defense – this is where we need joint R&D with the US.”
Hayman has also said that Israel must prove it cannot be only a temporary “start-up” nation but a true long-term “growth” nation.
He said that selling defense technology to the world cannot be limited to a single product, such as a single air-defense battery, but should be channeled to move from “special” relations with the US and other countries to truly unique and deep relations.
The former IDF intelligence chief said that quantum sensors, communications, encryption, and computing would account for 90% of future intelligence, making Israel’s digital world more secure and the rest of the world’s digital archives far less secure.
Next, Lorber hopes to build a technology and quantum ecosystem with the US, including cooperation with the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense’s DARPA research organization, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where the standard red tape is removed to focus on results.
Another goal is to build the ecosystem in such a way as to keep Israel’s physical talent pool of quantum experts remaining within the Jewish state, even as their information is shared with America and other countries.
If, in the past, Iran talked about building a “ring of fire” around Israel using its proxies, Lorber talks about building a “ring of smart power” to prevent China, Iran, and others from isolating and overcoming individual countries.
She also said this will go beyond Israel’s traditional “QME” (qualitative military edge) to hopefully ensure an Israeli “QTE” – qualitative technological edge.
Lorber has said that US President Donald Trump and Congress being unusually pro-Israel, regional momentum after the June war against Iran, and America’s embracing the countries of the region to prevent their influence from shifting to the Chinese side of the map have opened special opportunities.
But as Lorber has warned, what if the EU limits funding for non-European countries once the implications of who is ahead become clearer and nations become more protectionist in their dealings?
That is regarding Israel’s top prospects.
Cooperation with Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE
There is also lower-hanging fruit.
Lorber said that Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan have a strong interest in cooperating with Israel on technological advancement. She added that certain new platforms may increase the extent to which Israel can share research with foreign third parties.
Besides the US and the EU as the top prospects for joint quantum computing work, and the lower-hanging fruit like Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan, there are also mid-level options like the Saudis and the UAE.
At the July conference, Lorber and others discussed opportunities in Riyadh and Dubai, given the substantial funding those countries can allocate to new technologies.
However, there are major limits there.
The UAE and Israel already have very close cyber and other technological cooperation, and they joined the Abraham Accords in 2020.
But the Saudis have slowed progress toward normalization with Israel due to the war and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s resistance in the foreseeable future to a Palestinian state.
How far will Israel and the Saudis go in cooperating on a sensitive issue like quantum computing as long as normalization processes are frozen?
And if Israel is not proactive, will it miss the train leaving the station?
The urgency to act increased following Israel’s exclusion from a 2025 AI research pact between the US, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.
According to Globes, this exclusion fueled concerns in the Jewish state of being sidelined in the global race for both AI and quantum leadership, especially as Gulf states rapidly increase their capabilities via joint foreign partnerships.
Likewise, earlier in 2025, the White House, the quantum computing company Quantinuum, and the Qatari Al Rabban Capital announced a $1b. joint venture for investing in quantum technologies and workforce development in the US and Qatar.
This eclipses America’s commitment to joint quantum projects with Israel.
Israel has the know-how in quantum technologies, but scaling them from a lab to real-world application requires infrastructure far beyond Israel’s domestic capacity. In contrast, the UAE and the Saudis have data centers, electricity generation, and sovereign wealth funds to support such growth.
So how does Israel compete when it neither has the energy nor large enough data centers, nor does it invest a large amount of the $56b. globally invested in quantum research in 2025 (up from $40b. in 2024 and $22b. in 2020).
How soon will the quantum revolutionize the world?
A top Israeli defense official said that one needs to distinguish between different levels of implementing the revolution.
Frequently, there are commentators who will predict that deploying quantum computing, and all of its revolutionary impacts, is only a year or a couple of years away.
But different stages of quantum computing mean very different things.
In 2019, Google achieved an early stage of “quantum supremacy,” carrying out a complex calculation designed to take normal “supercomputers” a long time, but which its small-scale quantum computer was able to do in a matter of minutes.
By 2022, quantum computers with a few hundred qubits (the fundamental unit of quantum information) were already available, as Israel established its national quantum initiative.
And yet, the world did not change significantly. Mostly, these early-stage quantum computers increase funding and the pace of the race for a mature quantum computer, which is the true prize.
Israeli officials did not have an opinion on which of the many types of quantum computers was the best to bet on for achieving true quantum supremacy first.
On the one hand, defense sources said that early-stage quantum computing implementations appear to be only a few years away.
Still, their real applications may be relatively limited, limited to scientific or other areas, defense sources indicated.
Additionally, there have been notable advances in quantum sensors and moderate progress in quantum communications.
Australia’s navy has already managed quantum sensor navigation using Earth’s gravity and magnetic fields for GPS-free positioning.
China’s Micius satellite, launched in 2016, has already enabled the first demonstrations of quantum-encrypted data sent from space. Early in 2025, the Jinan-1 microsatellite pushed this work further by establishing a 12,900 km. quantum connection between China and South Africa.
However, a truly revolutionary and universal quantum computer, including error correction, is expected to take longer and is difficult to fully estimate. But an additional eight to 10 years could be a reasonable estimate, The Jerusalem Post has learned.
In the context of maintaining Israel’s comparative advantage, defense sources said the country is continuing to develop capabilities that will keep it a leader and the tip of the spear in post-quantum encryption (PQE).
PQE would theoretically keep users safe even from attacks by advanced quantum computers.
The Israeli government has not yet issued binding directives on the issue.
But the US National Institute of Standards and Technology began transitioning to PQE in 2022, with several large companies, including Google, already using PQE across many aspects of their operations.
NIST has stated that a significant portion of the transition to PQE must occur by 2030, and a complete shift to PQE must occur by 2035.
Exactly where Israel will come out in the quantum race is still up in the air, but the Jewish state, including some of the new INSS initiatives, is right in the battle.