Australian technology will be crucial for developing miniature, mobile quantum computers within four years in a groundbreaking German deal.
Canberra-based Quantum Brilliance is one of three winning bidders announced by cyber agency Cyberagentur on Wednesday in Halle, Germany for a project to counter increasing cyber threats.
With Germany needing technological sovereignty in cyberspace to counter threats from Russia and elsewhere, Cyberagentur wants it up and running by 2027.
"We're very proud to be part of the solution," Quantum chief executive Mark Luo told AAP from Halle.
"The achievement is quite groundbreaking - an offshore entity actually doing quite deep evaluation and going 'you guys have the leading capability to do this'," he said.
The goal of the 35 million euro project is secure and reliable computing power for cryptography and battlefield decisions at quantum speeds.
While billions of dollars have been spent on mainframe machines that require energy-intensive cooling, the industry has also been working on building smaller ones.
Quantum's bid, in partnership with Austria-headquartered ParityQC, was selected for its synthetic diamond-based quantum technology that can operate at room temperature.
Cyberagentur envisages defence, security and eventually commercial applications for mobile quantum computers that can be used in the field instead of in data centres or depending on cloud access.
Mr Luo said having a quantum sensing device on the move would be "extraordinarily powerful" in an era of increasing instability.
"Quantum machine learning at the edge will ultimately be more powerful than artificial intelligence ... Enhanced signal processing is quite useful as well," he said.
"If you have a small-sized - weight and power - computer that you can deploy in all types of complex environments, then you're able to look at applications in different ways."
Designed to operate in harsh and remote environments, such as temperatures of minus-40C or between 50C and 200C, their design also has lower energy consumption at 300-500 watts.
"It becomes quite an easily deployable system compared to others," he said.
