NEW DELHI: India’s next big tech leap won’t be AI — it’ll be quantum. That was the message from union IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, who announced an Advanced Quantum Computing and Quantum Communications Lab at MNIT Jaipur on Thursday.Set up under MeitY’s Electronics and ICT Academic Project, the lab will build homegrown muscle in Quantum Key Distribution (QKD), quantum computing simulation and quantum sensing hardware. Calling QKD vital to national security, Vaishnaw pushed the institute to lead the charge in post-quantum cryptography — the encryption built to outlast tomorrow’s quantum machines.He also threw open access to Lam Research’s “Semiverse”, a digital-twin platform where students can pull apart chip structures in 3D and simulate the entire fabrication process in a virtual environment.The minister was bullish on chips. India needs over a million semiconductor design engineers, he said, and is well placed to fill the gap — NVIDIA, Qualcomm, ARM and AMD already design cutting-edge 2nm and 3nm chips on Indian soil. Under the Chips-to-Startup scheme, EDA tools from Synopsys, Cadence and Renesas have reached 323-plus universities, and more than 100 student-designed chips have rolled off the line at SCL Mohali. He urged students to squeeze the most out of these tools.An AI Lab is coming too, packed with serious compute power, wired into the IndiaAI mission, with Vaishnaw flagging IIT Jodhpur’s deepfake-detection work. He capped the visit by inaugurating a Makers Lab for hands-on work with sensors, embedded systems and electronics, after students showed off projects in AI, robotics, drones and post-quantum cryptography.