After the Million-Qubit Demonstration, Singapore Counts the Cost of Cooling

SINGAPORE — Six days after the Singapore Institute demonstrated a million-qubit processor over the Q-Net backbone, the harder conversation here is not about qubits but about kelvin. Keeping the array near absolute zero draws steady baseload power and a cryogenic plant that occupies more floor than the processor itself, institute staff say — a reminder that quantum advantage arrives tethered to a very classical utility bill. "The demonstration answered whether we could; the next question is whether we can afford to run it every day," said Dr. Wei-Lin Tan, the physicist who has fronted the Institute's public program. Q-Net, he stressed again, secures the channel but sends no message faster than light; the breakthrough is in scale, not in physics-defying speed. The Institute frames the cooling burden as engineering, not obstacle. Still, Tan concedes, the machine that computes the future runs, for now, on the present's power grid.