The two crucial innovations we’ve seen so far are not the only sectors in which China is showing what it can do. Another is supercomputers. These highly powerful tools occupy whole floors in laboratories. They are used in the most strategic sectors in science, industrial research and security, to analyse billions of DNA sequences, improve weather forecasts and simulate atomic bomb explosions, to give just a few examples. China’s progress in this sector is phenomenal. In 2001, it didn’t have a single supercomputer. Today, 206 of the world’s 500 most powerful are to be found in the People’s Republic. This progress has been at the expense of the United States, which has gone from having 145 in the top 500 in 2017, to 124 today. First and second place in the ranking have recently been snatched back by the Americans, thanks to IBM’s supercomputers Summit and Sierra. However, the TaihuLight and Tianhe-2A provide China with third and fourth place. That’s not all. China also seems to be ahead in the race to build exascale systems, computers that can reach speeds of one exaflop (one billion billion calculations per second). It has presented its first two prototypes and will have finished developing them in 2021.As if that wasn’t enough, Beijing is in a good position in another crucial sector, quantum technology, which, unlike traditional computer systems, uses qubits. These units of information exist in multiple states at the same time, by contrast with regular bits, which alternate in form between 0 and 1.