Preparing for the next Y2K moment

Amaravati Quantum Valley Declaration anticipates a trillion-dollar opportunity. Rest of India should log in

- Vivek Wadhwa

The government of Andhra Pradesh issued the Amaravati Quantum Valley Declaration earlier this week, committing to transform the state capital into a global hub for quantum innovation. The plan includes installing an IBM Quantum System Two by early 2026, building India's largest open quantum testbed (QChipIN), supporting the launch of 100 quantum startups, and training 5,000 specialists annually by 2030. The goal is to test 1,000 quantum algorithms a year and achieve 1,000 effective qubits by 2029.

This is a smart move because a trillion-dollar opportunity is opening up.

In the late 1990s, a looming crisis galvanised the Indian technology industry like nothing before: the Y2K bug. As the world braced for computer systems to fail when the calendar flipped to 2000, companies and governments scrambled to fix outdated software written decades earlier. What followed was a windfall for India. Tens of thousands of young engineers, fresh from university or retraining boot camps, stepped in to debug code and modernise systems.

Now, a quarter-century later, the world is headed toward another such moment a problem of breathtaking complexity, urgency, and scale.

Only this time, it won't be about two-digit dates. It will be about quantum computers and their ability to shatter the cryptographic codes that underpin nearly every system we rely on - from banking and e-commerce to messaging apps and government databases.

This will be the mother of all Y2Ks, made possible by a radically new type of computer.