It will use supercooled circuits made of superconducting materials. It will use 40 to 1000 times less energy.
The plan is to make a prototype of the machine as early as 2022.
It should be able to achieve processor speeds of 770 gigahertz or higher versus current commercial processor at 5 Ghz.
This will not be a quantum computer.
Xlichip, an electronics company based in Shenzhen, is working on superconducting chips. A field-programmable gate array (FPGA), a reconfigurable chip could be used to simulate and test the design of a large-scale, sophisticated integrated circuit.
In 2017, chinese researchers realized mass production of computer chips with 10,000 superconducting junctions.
Chen Quan, a supercomputer scientist at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, said superconducting was often mentioned in academic discussions on the development of the next generation of high-performance computers.
China was building more than one exascale computer and it is possible that one of the exaFLOP supercomputers will be superconductive.
The US has created 800,000 junctions in a superconducting chip. This was a joint research team at Stony Brook University and MIT squeezed into a chip.
The US also has awarded contracts to research teams at IBM, Raytheon-BBN and Northrop Grumman to build a superconducting computer.