The purchase of the F-35 goes far beyond fighter aircraft. From now on, this acquisition enables ETH Zurich to obtain an IBM quantum computer.
ETH Zurich will benefit from a quantum computer provided by the American group IBM, she announced in mid-September. The equipment will be financed by the aerospace manufacturer Lockheed Martin as part of the offset agreements tied to the purchase of the F-35 fighter jets.
At the signing of the contract, Lockheed Martin pledged to generate several billion Swiss francs of economic benefits in Switzerland. The funding for this quantum computer will be accounted for among those offsets.
“ETH Zurich and Switzerland thus gain access to one of the most modern quantum infrastructures in the world,” said Markus Gross, spokesperson for ETH Zurich. The computer is expected to be put into operation by the end of the year at ETH Zurich’s Swiss Center for Scientific Computing in Lugano.
The Swiss army hopes to benefit from it!
The fact that Armasuisse recognized this project as a compensatory offset related to the F-35 also demonstrates the Swiss authorities’ interest in quantum technologies.
The project is intended to contribute to the development of expertise in the field in Switzerland, says the Federal Office of Armaments. “Armasuisse and the army can benefit from it in the medium and long term, for example in the areas of cybersecurity and cryptography,” it notes.
Quantum computers could, in the long term, be able to bypass certain encryption systems currently in use. A development that already poses significant cybersecurity challenges on a global scale.
Lockheed Martin, however, also intends to exploit this infrastructure. The American group plans to conduct research on this quantum computer with IBM to develop a new navigation method.
The project costs are not disclosed. An absence of transparency quite common in this kind of operation, according to Thomas Friedli, economist at the University of St. Gallen and specialist in offset deals. “Offset deals constitute an extremely opaque market,” he notes.
Moreover, these offsets follow a specific accounting framework. Under the F-35 contract, Lockheed Martin has committed to generating offset business in Switzerland equal to at least 60% of the contract value. According to Armasuisse, this amounts to around three billion dollars.
According to Armasuisse, offsets increase the purchase price of the F-35 by 700 to 800 million francs. Some of this money is invested in projects not directly related to the fighter jet, such as quantum computing, nanotechnologies, or synthetic fuels for aviation.
