Singapore’s Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat (Bloomberg filepix)

SINGAPORE (May 30): Singapore will invest about US$222 million (S$300 million) as part of a new national quantum computing strategy to advance its research on the technology, Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat said on Thursday.

"We will establish a new National Quantum Processor Initiative to build capabilities in the design and build of quantum processors in Singapore," he said in a speech at the Asia Tech x Singapore Summit. The investment will be over five years, government officials said.

Tech firms such as Microsoft, Alphabet's Google and IBM, as well as nation-states across the world, are racing to create machines that can take advantage of quantum mechanics and potentially be capable of making scientific calculations that would otherwise take traditional computers millions of years.