Quantum on the Cloud

In January 2024, China put a homegrown quantum computer on the internet, and its biggest foreign user turned out to be the United States. Origin Quantum, a USTC spinout in Hefei often called China’s first quantum-computing company, opened cloud access to Origin Wukong, a third-generation superconducting machine built on an indigenous 72-qubit chip.^[1] Within days, remote accesses passed 350,000 from dozens of countries, with American users topping the list, a striking result given US export controls aimed at limiting China’s access to quantum technology.^[1] By early 2025 the government reported more than 20 million remote visits from 139 countries.^[2]

Homegrown, mostly

Wukong’s significance is less its qubit count than its supply chain. Under export pressure, Origin has built domestic versions of the hard peripheral technology, dilution refrigerators and qubit-control systems, and claims roughly 80% localisation of the stack.^[3] The honest caveat is the other 20%: independent analysis notes the missing pieces include pulse-tube cryocoolers, helium-3 and parametric amplifiers that China still cannot fully source, and cautions that Chinese quantum claims often lack independent verification.^[3]

A Chinese quantum computer’s largest foreign user base is American, the export controls’ clearest own-goal.

The localisation drive is the durable story precisely because it is a response to pressure rather than a marketing claim. Denied foreign tools, Origin had to build domestic dilution refrigerators and control systems, and each one it makes is a piece of a parallel supply chain that outlasts any single processor. The honest limit is the un-localised remainder, the cryocoolers, helium-3 and amplifiers still imported, which is mission-critical and where a bottleneck bites hardest. As with the chip stack, the interesting question is not the qubit count on the brochure but which layers of the supporting hardware China can actually make on its own.

The bottom line for capital

Cloud access is how quantum computing will be sold long before it is broadly useful, and Origin, alongside listed peers like QuantumCTek and educational-hardware maker SpinQ, is building the domestic ecosystem to do it.^[4] Usage figures are company- and state-sourced, so weight them accordingly. The more durable signal is the localisation drive: export controls have pushed China to build a parallel quantum supply chain, and that supply chain, not the qubit count, is where we look for defensible positions.