Data Analysis of 62 National Quantum Strategies Reveals Shifting Priorities

Researchers are increasingly focused on understanding how nations are preparing for the quantum revolution, and a new study offers the first comprehensive analysis of its kind. Simon Richard Goorney, Emre Aslan, and Aleksandrs Baskakovs, all from Aarhus University, alongside Borja Muñoz and Jacob Sherson et al., have meticulously examined 62 national strategic documents from 20 countries to map the evolving quantum ecosystem. Their data-driven approach, utilising artificial intelligence and natural language processing, uncovers twelve key topics driving national quantum strategies , from fundamental technical development to vital considerations like workforce training and governance. Significantly, the team’s temporal analysis demonstrates a clear move from prioritising basic quantum science towards practical applications and commercialisation, providing crucial insights for policymakers and charting a course for future innovation in this rapidly diversifying field.

As the global Quantum technology (QT) market is projected to reach $106 billion by 2040, interest has been continuously growing in understanding not only the technological development but also its broader societal implications. However, as global investments in quantum technologies increase, so too do concerns about emerging “quantum divides”, systemic disparities in access to quantum infrastructure, talent, research capacity, and industrial participation. These divides are not only geographical, separating countries with established quantum research hubs from those with limited technological capacity, but also socio-economic and institutional.

Left unaddressed, they risk entrenching inequalities between nations, where leading economies dominate quantum innovation while others rely on external access. At the institutional level, elite universities and research centers benefit from partnerships and funding, while smaller or less-connected institutions can be excluded. In addition, some social groups may benefit disproportionately from access to Quantum education, training, and employment, with already privileged populations being favoured. It is therefore essential to understand how different nations worldwide address the development of QT, how these narratives are changing over time, and what the implications are for the development of the quantum industry.

National Quantum Strategies Analysed, Data Quality is paramount

Data processing focused on the individual paragraph as the unit of analysis, resulting in a final dataset of 12,786 paragraphs extracted from the QSDs. Experiments revealed that, on average, 19% of pages were discarded due to low cosine similarity scores following text extraction and cleaning with the GPT-4 API, ensuring data quality. Custom stopwords, including country names and noise words, were removed, and text was converted to lowercase, with punctuation and special characters eliminated to refine the dataset. The team then applied the WordNet lemmatizer from NLTK, reducing words to their base forms for consistent analysis, further enhancing the robustness of the findings.

Global Quantum Policy Shifts to Commercialisation, accelerating innovation

Significantly, the team’s temporal analysis demonstrates a clear move from prioritising basic quantum science towards practical applications and commercialisation, providing crucial insights for policymakers and charting a course for future innovation in this rapidly diversifying field. Time-series analysis, utilising OLS regression models, quantified the prevalence of 12 identified topics as a percentage of each document, tracking changes over time using document release dates. These models allowed scientists to determine whether specific topics gained or lost prominence within national strategies, providing a nuanced understanding of evolving priorities. The study employed the BERTopic model, leveraging BERT embeddings to identify and label latent themes within the QSDs, uncovering 12 distinct topics ranging from technical development to workforce development and governance.

Measurements confirm that paragraphs exceeding 150 characters or beginning with a bullet point were retained, ensuring substantial content was included in the analysis. Furthermore, paragraphs referencing past events or initiatives outside the publishing nation were manually removed, focusing the analysis on current strategic content. This work advocates for more AI and data-driven analyses of the quantum ecosystem, paving the way for informed decision-making and strategic planning. The breakthrough delivers insights into the increasing diversification of the quantum technology field, offering valuable information for policymakers and stakeholders alike. This research provides a scalable framework for understanding the technological and societal challenges of the second quantum revolution.